Expiation without Blood: An Essay on Substitution and the Trauma of Goodness in Levinas

The aim of this article is to develop a novel interpretation of the significance of trauma and substitution in Levinas’s ethical thinking in light of the problem of temporality, language, and the question of what it means to be a created being. With an emphasis on Levinas’s style of writing, the intersections of Derrida, Husserl, and Freud in his thinking, and the “two-times” of traumatic temporality, the argument of this article seeks to understand how responsibility for the other is crystallized through the trauma of the Goodness and expiation for the impossibility of enduring its unforgiving demand.