Felix culpa. Levinas e il paradosso del tempo

Levinas’ recourse to the enigmatic notion of ‘felix culpa’ is too frequent to be random. This paper aims to bring out the essential link between this idea and the Levinasian understanding of time. From a close reading of the texts in which the expression occurs, it can be argued that felix culpa is the keystone for overcoming traditional models of temporality and for introducing a new phenomenological paradigm. From this vantage point, temporality shows itself as overlapping of different times, as paradox of retroaction, as forgiveness, as fecundity.