Emmanuel Levinas

Introduction

Emmanuel Levinas is the French-Lithuanian philosopher whose work across six decades recentered phenomenology on the ethical encounter with the Other and produced one of the most distinctive philosophical projects of the postwar period. The two major works — Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity, 1961) and Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence (Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 1974) — made ethics first philosophy: the encounter with the other person, on Levinas's account, is not one philosophical topic among others but the foundational structure that any philosophical inquiry presupposes.

Levinas's career integrated academic philosophy with Jewish religious thought. He served as director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale (the secondary school that trained French Jewish teachers for the Mediterranean Jewish communities) from 1946 to 1961, and his corpus of Talmudic readings and Jewish philosophical writings (collected in Difficile liberté, 1963; Quatre lectures talmudiques, 1968; Du sacré au saint, 1977; L'au-delà du verset, 1982) represents one of the major engagements with Jewish thought in twentieth-century French philosophy.

Life

Emmanuel Levinas was born on January 12, 1906, in Kaunas (then in the Russian Empire, now in Lithuania) to an observant Jewish family. The early education was in a traditional Jewish setting alongside Russian and Lithuanian secular schooling; the family fled to Ukraine during the First World War and returned to Kaunas in 1920. The cultural formation — traditional Jewish learning, Russian literature (especially Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy), the broader European cultural traditions — shaped Levinas's lifelong sensibility.

Levinas began university studies at the University of Strasbourg in 1923, taking his BA in 1927 and studying with the major Strasbourg phenomenologists (Maurice Halbwachs, Charles Blondel, Maurice Pradines). In 1928–29 he spent two semesters at Freiburg studying directly with Husserl (whose retirement lectures he attended) and Heidegger (whose Being and Time had appeared the previous year). The Freiburg encounter was decisive; Levinas brought phenomenology to French audiences through his doctoral thesis La théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, 1930), which was the first French book-length study of Husserl.

Levinas became a French citizen in 1930 and served as an interpreter for Russian and German prisoners during the early phase of World War II. Captured by the Germans in 1940, he spent the war as a prisoner in a German military camp where his status as a French soldier (rather than as a Jewish civilian) saved him from extermination; his wife and daughter survived in hiding in France; his Lithuanian family was murdered in the Holocaust. The wartime experience shaped Levinas's lifelong concerns with the conditions of ethical possibility in the face of historical evil.

The postwar years were spent at the École Normale Israélite Orientale (which Levinas directed from 1946 to 1961) while he continued his philosophical work. The publication of Totality and Infinity in 1961 and the appointment to the University of Poitiers (1961–67), Paris-Nanterre (1967–73), and finally the Sorbonne (1973–79) brought him into mainstream French academic philosophy. He retired from the Sorbonne in 1979 but continued to publish and lecture until his death.

Levinas died on December 25, 1995, in Paris.

The problem he worked on

Levinas's project across his philosophical career was the development of a phenomenology adequate to the ethical structure of human existence. The phenomenological tradition as he inherited it from Husserl and Heidegger had developed analyses of consciousness, of being-in-the-world, of the structures of intentionality and temporality. But neither Husserl's transcendental subjectivity nor Heidegger's Dasein adequately addressed what Levinas took to be the foundational structure: the encounter with the Other (Levinas uses the capital-A Autrui for the other person) as the source of ethical demand.

The Heideggerian framework was particularly problematic. Heidegger's ontology had organized philosophy around the question of Being and treated ethics as a derivative concern; Levinas's experience of the Holocaust and his post-1933 awareness of Heidegger's National Socialism shaped his lifelong conviction that any ontology that subordinates ethics produces precisely the conditions that the Heideggerian framework had failed to oppose. Ethics as first philosophy was Levinas's substantive alternative.

The positive project: the encounter with the face of the Other (le visage d'autrui) is the foundational ethical event from which the other structures of human existence derive. The face of the Other commands me before I have engaged in any reflection; the ethical command precedes the philosophical questions that ontology had treated as foundational; the response to the Other is what makes any subsequent philosophical inquiry possible.

Contributions

Totality and Infinity

The 1961 Totalité et infini: Essai sur l'extériorité (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority) is Levinas's first major systematic work and the canonical statement of the early framework. The book is organized in four sections: a methodological introduction (The Same and the Other); the analysis of interiority and enjoyment (the structure of the embodied self living from the world); the analysis of the encounter with the face (le visage) of the Other and the ethical command this encounter constitutes; the analysis of beyond the face (the institutional structures, especially fecundity and time, that develop from the foundational ethical encounter).

The central concept is the face (visage). The face is not a physical feature (eyes, nose, mouth) but the way the Other presents themselves to me as Other — as resistant to the categories of my understanding, as exceeding any thematization I might attempt of them, as commanding rather than being commanded. The face says thou shalt not kill; the ethical command precedes any explicit articulation and is the foundational structure of human relation.

The analysis distinguishes the ethical encounter with the Other from the broader ontological structure of totality. Western philosophy, on Levinas's diagnosis, has been dominated by the impulse toward totality — the integration of all beings into a single ontological framework that grasps them through comprehensive categories. The encounter with the Other resists this totalizing move; the Other is infinite in the precise sense that the encounter with the Other exceeds any categorization, any thematization, any reduction to the same. The ethical relation preserves the alterity of the Other against the totalizing impulse.

The book had immediate impact on French philosophical culture and gradually established Levinas as one of the major postwar French philosophers. Jacques Derrida's essay Violence and Metaphysics (in Writing and Difference, 1967) gave the major critical engagement with the book; the engagement shaped both Derrida's subsequent work and the broader French reception of Levinas.

Otherwise than Being

The 1974 Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence (Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence) is the second major work and Levinas's response to Derrida's critique. Where Totality and Infinity had still operated within the conceptual framework of phenomenology (the analyses of interiority, enjoyment, the face), Otherwise than Being attempts a more radical articulation. The book develops the framework of the saying (le dire) and the said (le dit) — the distinction between the immediate ethical address that any speech enacts and the propositional content that the address articulates; the analysis of substitution (the ethical situation in which I am responsible for the Other to the point of being able to substitute myself for them, taking on their suffering); the analysis of the trace (the way the Other has always already passed through the constitution of my own subjectivity, leaving traces that I cannot recover but cannot ignore).

The book is famously difficult. The prose proceeds through dense reformulations of phenomenological vocabulary, sustained engagement with biblical and Talmudic sources, and confrontation with the post-Heideggerian and post-structuralist developments of French philosophy. The framework is widely treated as Levinas's most distinctive philosophical contribution.

Talmudic readings

Levinas's corpus of Talmudic readings runs parallel to his philosophical work and constitutes one of the major engagements with Jewish thought in twentieth-century French philosophy. The lectures Levinas delivered at the annual Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française from 1957 onward, collected in Quatre lectures talmudiques (1968), Du sacré au saint (1977), L'au-delà du verset (1982), and Nouvelles lectures talmudiques (1996), develop substantive philosophical interpretations of Talmudic passages on a range of topics: messianism, the relation between Israel and the nations, the ethics of war, the structure of obligation, the nature of forgiveness.

The readings are distinctive in their philosophical ambition. Levinas does not treat the Talmud as a historical or cultural artifact but as a philosophical text whose engagement requires the same level of attention as the engagement with Plato or Heidegger. The framework opened a line of contemporary engagement between philosophy and Jewish thought that has continued through Robert Gibbs, Edith Wyschogrod, Annette Aronowicz, and others.

Key works

• The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology (1930)
• On Escape (1935)
• Existence and Existents (1947)
• Time and the Other (1947)
• Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger (1949, collected essays)
• Totality and Infinity (1961)
• Difficult Freedom (1963)
• Four Talmudic Readings (1968)
• Humanism of the Other (1972)
• Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974)
• Of God Who Comes to Mind (1982)
• Beyond the Verse (1982, collected Talmudic readings)

The Hachette and Albin Michel editions are the standard French texts. The Duquesne University Press editions (translated by Alphonso Lingis) made Totality and Infinity (1969) and Otherwise than Being (1981) available in English; the more recent translations through Stanford University Press, Continuum, and other publishers have made the broader corpus accessible. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Critchley and Bernasconi, eds., 2002) anchors the introductory literature.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Husserl (his Freiburg teacher; the phenomenological framework Levinas extended); Heidegger (his Freiburg teacher; the ontological framework Levinas opposed after Heidegger's National Socialism); Kierkegaard (the religious-existentialist predecessor); Franz Rosenzweig (the major influence on Levinas's Jewish philosophical work, especially through Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption, 1921); Dostoevsky (whose engagement with the relation to the other shaped Levinas's ethical sensibility); the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition (the Volozhiner yeshivah tradition through Chaim of Volozhin, whose work Levinas engaged in his Talmudic lectures); the French phenomenological tradition through Maurice Halbwachs, Charles Blondel, Maurice Pradines (his Strasbourg teachers).

Influenced: Jacques Derrida (whose engagement with Levinas in Violence and Metaphysics, 1967, and Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, 1997, established Levinas as a major reference point for deconstruction); Jean-Luc Marion (whose phenomenology of givenness is in part a development of Levinasian themes); Paul Ricoeur (whose engagement with Levinas was substantial); Luce Irigaray (whose feminist engagement with Levinas in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 1984, has been substantial); Judith Butler (whose ethical work draws on Levinasian themes); Simon Critchley (the Anglo-American Levinasian); the contemporary engagement through Robert Bernasconi, Edith Wyschogrod, Robert Gibbs, Diane Perpich, and others; the broader engagement in religious studies, ethics, and the philosophy of the social through Levinasian frameworks.

Reception

Levinas's contemporary reception was within French philosophical circles from the 1960s onward but gradual in the Anglo-American world. The Duquesne University Press translations of the 1960s and 1970s established Levinas in English; the Derrida-Levinas engagement made him a major reference for deconstruction; the contemporary engagement through Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi, and others has continued to develop the reception.

The ethical-theological dimension of Levinas's work has made him read outside professional philosophy. The reception in religious studies (especially Jewish studies, Christian theology, and the broader engagement with ethics and religion), in literary theory, and in the contemporary engagement with the ethics of the encounter (especially in clinical ethics, in the ethics of immigration, in the ethics of war) has made Levinas one of the most-engaged twentieth-century continental philosophers.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Simon Critchley's The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1992, revised 1999), Adriaan Peperzak's To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1993), Robert Bernasconi's editorial and interpretive work, Edith Wyschogrod's Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (1974, revised 2000), Diane Perpich's The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (2008), Michael Morgan's Discovering Levinas (2007), and the Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Critchley and Bernasconi, eds., 2002). The Levinas Studies annual and the North American Levinas Society document continuing scholarship. Active debates concern the relation between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, the political dimensions of Levinas's work (especially around Zionism and the question of Israel), the relation between the philosophical and Talmudic corpora, and the contemporary applicability of the Levinasian framework in clinical ethics, immigration ethics, and the ethics of war.

Further reading

• Phenomenology — the tradition Levinas extended
• Husserl — his Freiburg teacher and the founder of the phenomenological tradition
• Heidegger — his Freiburg teacher whose ontology Levinas opposed
• Kierkegaard — the religious-existentialist predecessor
• Existentialism — the related tradition

The French-Lithuanian philosopher whose work recentered phenomenology on the ethical encounter with the Other and made ethics first philosophy.