Levinas was born on 12 January 1906, into amiddle-classLitvak family inKaunas, in present-dayLithuania, then Kovno district, at the Western edge of theRussian Empire. Because of the disruptions ofWorld War I, the family moved toKharkiv inUkraine in 1916, where they stayed during the Russian revolutions of February and October 1917. In 1920, his family returned to the Republic of Lithuania. Levinas's early education was in secular, Russian-language schools in Kaunas and Kharkiv.[8] Upon his family's return to the Republic of Lithuania, Levinas spent two years at a Jewishgymnasium before departing for France, where he commenced his university education.
Levinas began his philosophical studies at theUniversity of Strasbourg in 1923,[9] and his lifelong friendship with the French philosopherMaurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to theUniversity of Freiburg for two semesters to studyphenomenology underEdmund Husserl. AtFreiburg he also metMartin Heidegger, whose philosophy greatly impressed him. Levinas would in the early 1930s be one of the first French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl by translating, in 1931, Husserl'sCartesian Meditations (with the help of Gabrielle Peiffer and with advice fromAlexandre Koyré) and by drawing on their ideas in his own philosophy, in works such asLa théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology; his 1929/30doctoral thesis),De l'Existence à l'Existant (From Existence to Existents; 1947), andEn Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger; first edition, 1949, with additions, 1967). In 1929, he was awarded his doctorate (Doctorat d'université degree) by the University of Strasbourg for his thesis on the meaning of intuition in the philosophy of Husserl, published in 1930.
Levinas became a naturalized French citizen in 1939.[10] When France declared war on Germany, he reported for military duty as a translator of Russian and French.[9] During the German invasion of France in 1940, his military unit was surrounded and forced to surrender. Levinas spent the rest ofWorld War II as aprisoner of war in a camp nearHanover inGermany. Levinas was assigned to a special barrack for Jewish prisoners, who were forbidden any form of religious worship. Life in the Fallingbostel camp was difficult, but his status as a prisoner of war protected him fromthe Holocaust's concentration camps.[11] Other prisoners saw him frequently jotting in a notebook. These jottings were later developed into his bookDe l'Existence à l'Existant (1947) and a series of lectures published under the titleLe Temps et l'Autre (1948). His wartime notebooks have now been published in their original form asŒuvres: Tome 1, Carnets de captivité: suivi de Écrits sur la captivité; et, Notes philosophiques diverses (2009).
Meanwhile,Maurice Blanchot helped Levinas's wife and daughter spend the war in a monastery, thus sparing them from the Holocaust. Blanchot, at considerable personal risk, also saw to it that Levinas was able to keep in contact with his immediate family through letters and other messages. Other members of Levinas's family were not so fortunate; his mother-in-law was deported and never heard from again, while his father and brothers were killed by theSS in Lithuania.[12] After the Second World War, he studied theTalmud under the enigmaticMonsieur Chouchani, whose influence he acknowledged only late in his life.
Levinas's first book-length essay,Totality and Infinity (1961), was written as hisDoctorat d'État primary thesis (roughly equivalent to aHabilitation thesis). His secondary thesis was titledÉtudes sur la phénoménologie (Studies on Phenomenology).[13] After earning his habilitation, Levinas taught at a private Jewish High School in Paris, theÉcole normale Israélite orientale (Paris) [fr], eventually becoming its director.[14] He participated in 1957 at the International Meeting at themonastery of Toumliline, a conference focused on contemporary challenges and interfaith dialogue.[15][16] Levinas began teaching at theUniversity of Poitiers in 1961, at the Nanterre campus of theUniversity of Paris in 1967, and at theSorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He published his second major philosophical work,Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence, in 1974. He was also a professor at theUniversity of Fribourg inSwitzerland. In 1989, he was awarded theBalzan Prize for Philosophy.
According to his obituary inThe New York Times,[17] Levinas came to regret his early enthusiasm for Heidegger, after the latter joined theNazis. Levinas explicitly framed several of his mature philosophical works as attempts to respond to Heidegger's philosophy in light of its ethical failings.
His son is the composerMichaël Levinas, and his son-in-law is the French mathematicianGeorges Hansel. Among his most famous students is Rabbi Baruch Garzon from Tetouan (Morocco), who studied with Levinas at the Sorbonne and later went on to become one of the most important Rabbis of the Spanish-speaking world.
In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals surrounding the philosopherJean Wahl as a leading French thinker. His work is based on theethics ofthe Other or, in Levinas's terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditionalmetaphysics (which Levinas called "ontology"). Levinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the "love of wisdom" (the usual translation of the Greek "φιλοσοφία"). In his view, responsibility towards the Other precedes any "objective searching after truth".
Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of theface-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privilegedphenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. "The Other preciselyreveals himself in hisalterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."[18] At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, and this demand is before one can express or know one's freedom to affirm or deny.[19] One instantly recognizes the transcendence andheteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of this otherness.
While critical of traditional theology, Levinas does require that a "trace" of the Divine be acknowledged within an ethics of Otherness. This is especially evident in his thematization of debt and guilt. "A face is a trace of itself, given over to my responsibility, but to which I am wanting and faulty. It is as though I were responsible for his mortality, and guilty for surviving."[20] The moral "authority" of the face of the Other is felt in my "infinite responsibility" for the Other.[21] The face of the Other comes towards me with its infinite moral demands while emerging out of the trace.
Apart from this morally imposing emergence, the Other's face might well be adequately addressed as "Thou" (along the lines proposed byMartin Buber) in whose welcoming countenance I might find great comfort, love and communion of souls—but not a moral demand bearing down upon me from a height. "Through a trace the irreversible past takes on the profile of a 'He.' The beyond from which a face comes is in the third person."[22] It is because the Other also emerges from theilleity of a He (il in French) that I instead fall into infinite debt vis-à-vis the Other in a situation of utterly asymmetrical obligations: I owe the Other everything, the Other owes me nothing. The trace of the Other is the heavy shadow of God, the God who commands, "Thou shalt not kill!"[23] Levinas takes great pains to avoid straightforward theological language.[24] The very metaphysics of signification subtending theological language is suspected and suspended by evocations of how traces work differently than signs. Nevertheless, the divinity of the trace is also undeniable: "the trace is not just one more word: it is the proximity of God in the countenance of my fellowman."[25] In a sense, it is divine commandment without divine authority.
FollowingTotality and Infinity, Levinas later argued that responsibility for the other is rooted within the subjective constitution. The first line of the preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."[26] This idea appears in his thoughts on recurrence (chapter 4 inOtherwise than Being), in which Levinas maintains that subjectivity is formed in and through subjection to the other. Subjectivity, Levinas argued, is primordially ethical, not theoretical: that is to say, responsibility for the other is not a derivative feature of subjectivity, but instead,founds subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a meaningful direction and orientation. Levinas's thesis "ethics as first philosophy", then, means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of knowledge is secondary to a basic ethical duty to the other. To meet the Other is to have the idea of Infinity.[27]
The elderly Levinas was a distinguished French public intellectual, whose books reportedly sold well. He had a major influence on the younger, but more well-knownJacques Derrida, whose seminalWriting and Difference contains an essay, "Violence and Metaphysics", that was instrumental in expanding interest in Levinas in France and abroad. Derrida also delivered a eulogy at Levinas's funeral, later published asAdieu à Emmanuel Levinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. In a memorial essay for Levinas,Jean-Luc Marion claimed that "If one defines a great philosopher as someone without whom philosophy would not have been what it is, then in France there are two great philosophers of the 20th century:Bergson and Lévinas."[28]
His works have been a source of controversy since the 1950s, whenSimone de Beauvoir criticized his account of the subject as being necessarily masculine, as defined against a feminine other.[29] While other feminist philosophers likeTina Chanter and the artist-thinkerBracha L. Ettinger[30][31] have defended him against this charge, increasing interest in his work in the 2000s brought a reevaluation of the possible misogyny of his account of the feminine, as well as a critical engagement with his French nationalism in the context of colonialism. Among the most prominent of these are critiques bySimon Critchley andStella Sandford.[32] However, there have also been responses which argue that these critiques of Levinas are misplaced.[33]
For three decades, Levinas gave short talks onRashi, a medieval French rabbi, every Shabbat morning at the Jewish high school in Paris where he was the principal. This tradition strongly influenced many generations of students.[34]
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne,[35] renowned Belgian filmmakers, have referred to Levinas as an important underpinning for their filmmaking ethics.
In his bookLevinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine, authorSam B. Girgus argues that Levinas has dramatically affected films involving redemption.[36]
A full bibliography of all Levinas's publications up until 1981 is found in Roger BurggraeveEmmanuel Levinas (1982).
A list of works, translated into English but not appearing in any collections, may be found inCritchley, S. andBernasconi, R. (eds.),The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 269–270.
Books
1929.Sur les « Ideen » de M. E. Husserl
1930.La théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology)
1931.Der Begriff des Irrationalen als philosophisches Problem (with Heinz Erich Eisenhuth)
1931.Fribourg, Husserl et la phénoménologie
1931.Les recherches sur la philosophie des mathématiques en Allemagne, aperçu général (with W. Dubislav)
1931.Méditations cartésiennes. Introduction à la phénoménologie (with Edmund Husserl and Gabrielle Peiffer)
1998.De l'obliteration. Entretien avec Françoise Armengaud à propos de l'œuvre de Sosno (»On Obliteration: Discussing Sacha Sosno, trans. Richard A. Cohen, in:Art and Text (winter 1989), 30-41.)
2006.Œuvres: Tome 1, Carnets de captivité: suivi de Écrits sur la captivité ; et, Notes philosophiques diverses, Posthumously published by Grasset & Fasquelle
Articles in English
"A Language Familiar to Us".Telos 44 (Summer 1980). New York: Telos Press.
^abShapiro, Susan E."Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995)".Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. Routledge. Retrieved14 October 2018.
^Bergo, Bettina."Emmanuel Levinas".Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopher. Retrieved14 October 2018.
^Bergo, Bettina (2019),"Emmanuel Levinas", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.),The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved2022-07-17.
^Alan D. Schrift (2006),Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes And Thinkers, Blackwell Publishing, p. 159.
^For recent reflections on the ethical-political imports of Levinas's tradition (and biography), along with the examination of the notion of theface-to-face in relation tole visage, while taking into account the Levantine/Palestinian standpoint on conflict, see:Nader El-Bizri, "Uneasy Meditations Following Levinas,"Studia Phaenomelnologica, Vol. 6 (2006), pp. 293–315.
^Emmanuel Levinas,Otherwise than Being, trans. A. Lingis (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1974), p. 91.
^Levinas, Entre Nous, trans. M. B. Smith & B. Harshav (New York: Columbia, 1998), p. 74.
^Levinas, "The Trace of the Other," inDeconstruction in Context, ed. M. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 356.
^Levinas,Difficult Freedom, trans. S. Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990), p. 8f.
^"A face does not function in proximity as a sign of a hidden God who would impose the neighbor on me."Otherwise than Being, p. 94.
^French: "Aborder Autrui [...] c'est donc recevoir d'Autrui au-delà de la capacité du Moi: ce qui signifie exactement: avoir l'idée de l'infini." inTotalité et Infini, Martinus Nijhoff, La Haye, 1991, p. 22.
^de Beauvoir, S. (2009).The Second Sex. New York: Vintage. p. 6.ISBN9780307277787.
^Bracha L. Ettinger in conversation with Emmanuel Lévinas, (1991–1993). Time is the Breath of the Spirit. Translated by C. Ducker and J. Simas (with portrait-photos of E. L. taken by Bracha L.E.). Oxford: MOMA, 1993. Reprinted (Hebrew) in: Iyyun, Oct. 1994. Reprinted (Russian) in: Kabinet, Prilozehnie nº 3, 1994. Reprinted as "Un monde sans moi" (French) in: Athanor nº 5: 29–33, 1994. Reprinted in: Kaninet – An Anthology. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1997.
^Emmanuel Lévinas in conversation with Bracha L. Ettinger, (1991–1993). "Le féminin est cette différence inouïe". Four one-off Artist's Books, 1994. Reprinted as "Que dirait Eurydice?" Braka! nº 8, 1997. Reprinted as "Que dirait Eurydice?"/"What Would Eurydice Say?" (English/French) to coincide with Kabinet exhibition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997. Reprinted in Athena: Philosophical Studies. Vol. 2, 2006.
^Critchley, S. 2004. "Five Problems in Levinas’ View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them". Political Theory 32, 2;172-185. V. also Sandford, S. 2001. The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, New York.
Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, Robert Bernasconi & Simon Critchley,Emmanuel Levinas (1996).
Astell, Ann W. and Jackson, J. A.,Levinas and Medieval Literature: The "Difficult Reading" of English and Rabbinic Texts (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University press, 2009).
Batnitzky, Leora,Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas : philosophy and the politics of revelation, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Theodore De Boer,The Rationality of Transcendence: Studies in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1997.
Roger Burggraeve,The Wisdom of Love in the Service of Love: Emmanuel Levinas on Justice, Peace, and Human Rights, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2002.
Roger Burggraeve (ed.)The awakening to the other: a provocative dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas, Leuven: Peeters, 2008
Hanoch Ben-Pazi,Emmanuel Levinas: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Art, Journal of Literature and Art Studies 5 (2015), 588 - 600
Richard A. Cohen,Out of Control: Confrontations Between Spinoza and Levinas, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016.
Richard A. Cohen,Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010.
Richard A. Cohen,Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation After Levinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Richard A. Cohen,Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994.
Joseph Cohen,Alternances de la métaphysique. Essais sur Emmanuel Levinas, Paris: Galilée, 2009. [in French]
Simon Critchley, "Emmanuel Levinas: A Disparate Inventory," inThe Cambridge Companion to Levinas, eds. S. Critchley &R. Bernasconi. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Derrida, Jacques,Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Derrida, Jacques, "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," trans. Ruben Berezdivin and Peggy Kamuf, inPsyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. 143-90.
Ellis, Marc H.,Encountering the Jewish future : with Elie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas. Minneapolis : Fortress Press, 2011.
Bracha L. Ettinger, conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, (1991–1993).Time is the Breath of the Spirit. Oxford: MOMA, 1993.
Bracha L. Ettinger,Que dirait Eurydice?/What Would Eurydice Say?, conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, (1991–1993). Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997. Reprinted inAthena: Philosophical Studies Vol. 2, 2006.
Bernard-Donals, Michael, "Difficult Freedom: Levinas, Memory and Politics", inForgetful Memory, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. 145-160.
Derrida, Jacques, "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas," inWriting and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 79-153.
Michael Eskin,Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Alexandre Guilherme and W. John Morgan, 'Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995)-dialogue as an ethical demand of the other', Chapter 5 inPhilosophy, Dialogue, and Education: Nine modern European philosophers, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 72–88,ISBN978-1-138-83149-0.
Emmanuel Levinas,Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R.A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Signature," inDifficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 & 1997.
John Llewelyn,Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics, London: Routledge, 1995
John Llewelyn,The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas, London: Routledge, 2000.
John Llewelyn,Appositions – of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Paul Marcus,Being for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas, Ethical Living, and Psychoanalysis, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2008.
Paul Marcus,In Search of the Good Life: Emmanuel Levinas, Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living, London: Karnac Books, 2010.
Newton, Adam Zachary (2001).The fence and the neighbor : Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Israel among the nations. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.ISBN0791447847.
Diane PerpichThe ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008
Fred Poché,Penser avec Arendt et Lévinas. Du mal politique au respect de l'autre,Chronique Sociale, Lyon, en co-édition avec EVO, Bruxelles et Tricorne, Genève, 1998 (3e édition, 2009).
Jadranka Skorin-Kapov,The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise: Phenomenology and Speculation, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015.
Sessler, Tal (2022).Leibowitz and Levinas : Between Judaism and universalism. Translated by Levy, Eylon. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press.ISBN9781644698556.
Tanja Staehler,Plato and Levinas – the ambiguous out-side of ethics, London: Routledge 2010 [i.e. 2009]
Toploski, Anya. 2015.Arendt, Levinas, and politics of relationality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Wehrs, Donald R.:Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstruction of Subjectivity. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013.ISBN3826061578
The Levinas Online Bibliography (Prof. dr. Joachim Duyndam, editor-in-chief),levinas.nl Hosted by the University of Humanistics, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Annual Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar, Director: Richard A. Cohen:[1]
