Active, passive

Here's a way to think about the relation of three thinkers to the activity or passivity in intentionality--that is, in the emphasis or accent placed on one or the other, such that intentionality does not become so strictly Husserlian but rather turns into an interpretation of what Husserl is or should be getting at (so when I speak of intentionality, obviously none of these thinkers--and especially Husserl--would call it by that name):

For Heidegger, the fundamental intention is anticipation beyond anticipation in being-towards death.  One could label this activity beyond activity.

For Levinas, the fundamental intention is awaiting beyond awaiting in the ethical relation to the death of the other. So one could call this passivity beyond passivity.

For Derrida, the fundamental intention is living-on, or sur-viving, anticipating that is already beyond what it anticipates, or awaiting that is already missing what it is ready for. In other words, it could be called passivity beyond passivity to the point that it is indistinguishable from activity beyond activity.

Each one of these "intentionalities" implies a temporality (but also a spatiality--in the case of Heidegger it would be absent, or, more technically, involve the dispersion of the ecstases out of futurity to the extent that one would be talking about time when one properly talked about space... besides this, one wonders about Levinas), too: for Levinas, for example, time is what is given in relation to the other. Upon the institution of this relation, I am related to a future that is never to be here, that is disproportionately other than any any now or even any presence--or, perhaps put in a better way, to anything that has being. Being is secondary to or merely an effect of a relationship to the other that is temporal and gives me time.

Accounting for mourning

...here, this title announces both a subject and, for Derrida, a tautology or identity in difference, precisely as it also enacts the explanation or account that it announces: a substitution, a translation, a switching between one and the other is mourning, and is accounting or calculating--that is, work, mourning work. Accounting is substituted for mourning: this is the account of mourning, for Derrida. In other words, the transit between accounting or calculation, and the work which we do in mourning, can be summed up in how, in The Politics of Friendship, "how many of us are there?" is precisely the question of the work of mourning and friendship. Am I the other? Which other am I? My body becomes a crypt for the incorporated/introjected other, and for every other. For each other is every bit other, for Derrida. Counting the others--mourning them--is, then, accounting for them, being responsible for them. And for me, who is included in the "us" of "how many of us are there?" I too am other (like in Levinas), and account for myself in counting the others. But counting is only accounting--that is, mourning work--if this counting is interminable, impossible, unable to be calculated or counted. For the moment I stop counting, I stop accounting. This is the double-bind of responsibility and friendship, which are mourning, for Derrida.

Levinas on Heidegger and Aristotle

I just think this is a wonderful interpretation of Heidegger, that lets you into the amazingly rich place where Levinas is coming from: the entirety of Being and Time can perhaps be read as the attempt to think as gathered-together or non-separated this separation Levinas marks in Aristotle:

Man is thus Da because this manner of having being in his charge is not an intellectual affair but man's entire concreteness. The Da is the manner of being-there in the world, which is to question about being. The search for the signification of being does not come about in the same manner as in Aristotle. Like Aristotle (see Metaphysics A, 2 ["We begin by wondering that things are as they are."]), Heidegger speaks of astonishment or wonder, but for Aristotle wonder is nothing other than the consciousness of one's own ignorance: knowledge comes from my wanting to know. There is in Aristotle a complete separation between Sorge and questioning, a complete disinteredness of knowledge. This is not at all the case in Heidegger.

-God Death and Time, 25

Now, the crucial thing for Levinas is that this gathering-together of what in Aristotle is separated is not taken far enough by Heidegger.