And then the new French article in the Bibliothèque, in which you can see that the results of his research may be no more spectacular than an awareness of the way one can be striving in vain towards a way out of being, all the time keeping oneself occupied by anxiously feeling hemmed in by frightful monsters. With just a slight suggestion that instead one could stop doing so, thus making room for an awareness of how one continuously has to posit oneself as 'quite someone'. In this connection you can find out for yourself how Levinas lectured already in 1948 – distancing himself from popular existentialist ideas – about loneliness as 'also a manliness and a pride and a sovereignty'. [in Le temps et l'Autre, translated by Richard A. Cohen in 1987 as Time and the Other
Levinas et les absurdistes also shows the quite unobtrusive way in which the philosopher can prove himself as an exemplary specimen of this egoïty by simply proposing – as a new answer to the age-old question regarding the outcome of experiencing the desintegration of a collapsing world – instead of the famous I am doubting, so I am.
The unique French term for 'being in general' that he discovered, with the crucial role therein for that one fragment of an impersonal avoir of nix: it's a brilliant solution, and a nightmare for translators… Not logically absurd in itself – but we may still find perhaps a link to absurdity in its antique connotation with deafness, when Levinas mentions the buzzing or droning sounds [bruissement] of il y a. We'll see about that later.