Levinas Studies. Volume 5

2012

Like his one-time teacher, Heidegger, Levinas makes a distinction between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes), but prefers to speak of ‘existence’ and the ‘existent’. Again, like Heidegger, Levinas understands existence in its verbal sense as the selfunfolding act of Being that is attested to in the manifestation of particular beings. Unlike his teacher, however, existence signals for him the unbearable heaviness of Being, as if being a Jew as opposed to being a German in Europe in the years preceding WWII cast a different light on the human existential condition, through which alone we have access to Being. Levinas’s particular conceptualisation of existence, forged at a particular world historical juncture, forms the basis for his particular ‘metaphysical’ account of the conditions of possibility of ethical action. Although Levinas’s early essays present us with an extensive mediation on the nature of existence, only a few commentators offer it more than a mere cursory sketch. My a...

French Studies: A Quarterly Review, 2007

Modern Judaism, 2000

Neither the life nor the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the remarkable French Jewish philosopher and talmudic commentator, fit easily into customary categories. Levinas, who died in Paris in late 1995 just a few weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday, was born in Lithuania and emigrated to France, becoming a French citizen in 1931. 1 While still in his early thirties Levinas seemed poised to enter a promising career as a philosophy professor. Then the Second World War broke out. Drafted into the French army, Levinas was soon captured and, in view of his status as a French soldier, was sent off to spend the next five years in Nazi prison camps. When the war ended he returned to Paris and soon found out that his family in Lithuania had been slaughtered. Levinas rebuilt his life and, some fifteen years later, finally began that promising academic career. He had in the meantime taken on an important role in Paris' growing postwar Jewish community as the head of a training institute for Jewish educators; he also spent many years learning Talmud with a noted teacher. 2 Levinas continued to participate actively in Jewish communal life in Paris both during his academic career and long after he retired from the university in 1976. Levinas' rich and complex life spanned many worlds. His work similarly resists disciplinary pigeonholes. He wrote with great acuity and mastery about philosophy, ethics, religion, literature, aesthetics, contemporary culture, and Jewish texts. His philosophical work is among the most important in the twentieth century. His several volumes of talmudic commentaries and his collection of essays on Jewish ideas and issues are also highly regarded. 3 His influence not only in philosophy and in Jewish thought, but in the humanities and social sciences as well, has been and continues to be significant. While scholars have generally acknowledged the exceptional nature of Levinas' life and the diversity of his work, they have been reluctant for the most part to admit what follows from this-that in order to understand Levinas' unique project as a whole, it may well be necessary to move beyond academic models and the disciplinary divisions they reflect. This does not, however, mean discarding academic procedures and distinctions; Levinas' work demands not something less than

The fame of Totality and Infinity and of Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas’s masterpieces, has in a way downplayed the importance of his early writings. Levinas himself seems to have encouraged the interpretation that favors his mature writings to the detriment of his texts published in the 1930s and 1940s. Except for his phenomenological studies on Husserl and Heidegger, he did not have his prewar writings reprinted. These texts remained relatively unknown for at least half a century. Indeed, they might have vanished entirely from memory were it not for sheer luck. Although Levinas was delighted to see it reprinted during his lifetime, he tended to consider “On Escape,” his 1935 essay where he presents his own philosophy for the first time, as a “youthful” writing (OE 1). It is possible that he no longer identified with the philosophy that he elaborated at the beginning of his itinerary. For us, these early writings are extremely interesting. They shed precious light on the origins of his philosophical thought, as well as on his relationship to Judaism before the war, at a time when he was not yet involved in Talmud study, and had not yet met the famous and mysterious Monsieur Chouchani.

Addressing Levinas, edited with Antje Kapust and Kent Still, 2005

Table of Contents and Nelson and Kapust, Preface An international group of scholars on a corpus becoming increasingly central to contemporary continental philosophy and ethics. At a time of great and increasing interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this volume draws readers into what Levinas described as "philosophy itself"--"a discourse always addressed to another." Thus the philosopher himself provides the thread that runs through these essays on his writings, a thread guided by the importance of the fact of being addressed--the significance of the Saying which is much more than the Said. The authors, leading Levinas scholars and interpreters from across the globe, explore the philosopher's relationship to a wide range of intellectual traditions, including theology, philosophy of culture, Jewish thought, phenomenology and the history of philosophy. They also engage Levinas's contribution to ethics, politics, law, justice, psychoanalysis and epistemology, among other themes. In their radical singularity, these essays reveal the inalienable alterity at the heart of Levinas's ethics. At the same time, each essay remains open to the others, and to the perspectives and positions they advocate. Thus the volume, in its quality and diversity, enacts an authentic encounter with Levinas's thought, embodying an intellectual ethics by virtue of its style. Bringing together contributions from philosophy, theology, literary theory, gender studies, and political theory, this book offers a deeper and more thorough encounter with Levinas's ethics. It shows readers a productive approach to a body of work that is becoming increasingly central to contemporary continental philosophy and ethics. "Emmanuel Levinas is today generally recognized to be one of the most important European thinkers of the twentieth century. If one wished to read a single volume to get a sense of the range and depth of contemporary criticism on this major, indispensable figure, Addressing Levinas would have to be it. This outstanding collection of essays brings together many of the best-known commentators on Levinas’s work—as well as some of his finest translators into English—on a variety of essential topics, from Levinas’s original reinterpretation of ethics, ontology, and phenomenology (for example, his analyses of the face, the Other, and death) to his important but often neglected political works, his rich Talmudic readings, and his suggestive if sometimes problematic relation to psychoanalysis and questions of sexual difference. Addressing Levinas is a collection wholly worthy of its most eminent and, sadly, now silent addressee." — Michael Naas, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University "Given the rapidly growing interest in Levinas, this volume has to be seen as an important contribution. Addressing Levinas gathers together the best-known scholars working today in French thought. Frequently reflecting on contemporary events, these essays demonstrate that Levinas's thought is not only appropriate but more than ever trenchant." — Leonard Lawlor, Faudree-Hardin University Professor of Philosophy, The University of Memphis

University of the Philippines

The trace that points to the Transcendent Being is embedded through the face of the Other because Infinity and Transcendence can be experienced only through the spiritual fraternity of human beings. The face of the Other points me to a common Creator. We can find the trace of the Infinite through the face of another human being because a trace does not begin in things, ideas, language, or sense data. A trace does not belong to this world; it belongs to the One who is absolutely Absent. Like the face, the trace seems to come to my sphere of existence as an alien visitation with strangeness, an otherness of the Other.

De Gruyter, 2021

The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas’s wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts for two novels afford new approaches to understanding the relationship between literature, philosophy, and religion. This volume gathers an international list of experts to examine new questions raised by Levinas’s deep and creative experiment in thinking at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. Chapters address the role and significance of poetry, narrative, and metaphor in accessing the ethical sense of ordinary life; Levinas's critical engagement with authors such as Leon Bloy, Paul Celan, Vassily Grossman, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot; analyses of Levinas’s draft novels Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler; and the application of Levinas's thought in reading contemporary authors such as Ian McEwen and Cormac McCarthy. Contributors include Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Kevin Hart, Eric Hoppenot, Vivian Liska, Jean-Luc Nancy and François-David Sebbah, among others.

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2003

The contemplation of life, the act of philosophy, the quest, the love and obsession, for understanding has done just that: Under-stand. A positing beneath the I; whatever phenomenon appears to us, we automatically place into a category or an imperative that needs to become over-come, at best; and, at worst, simply nominally represented.