Levinas, Literature, and Philosophy

This chapter explores posthumously published poems and fragments of novels by Levinas. It shows how seriously Levinas considered abandoning philosophy at a key moment in favor of writing novels. It examines how this calls into question some of Levinas’s positions regarding literature in the postwar period. It looks at how the thematics of his artistic plans conflict with ethical postulations in his major works. It traces relations between these plans and the work of key influential writers like Blanchot. It considers how these novelististic experiments recast Levinas’s essays on aesthetics. And it reflects on how knowledge of this work by Levinas must now inform our appreciation of his philosophical publications.

Introduction

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes—the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others—speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. This Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Levinas provides background on Levinas’s life and philosophical thought, and it surveys various approaches to and critical assessments of his contributions. The Handbook’s structure is laid out and each of the thirty-eight chapters is briefly summarized.

Levinas, Feminism, and Temporality

This chapter analyzes Levinas’s references to the feminine and the maternal through their connection to his treatment of time. Totality and Infinity provides a progressive narrative in which subjects are confronted with their responsibility to the other, and the feminine plays an instrumental role within that narrative. By contrast, Otherwise than Being discusses maternity in an anti-teleological, non-linear register. The maternal body is not the precursor to the ethical relation but an experience of ethical exposure, and one that confounds chronological representation. The concept of the maternal in Levinas’s later work thus more radically challenges the ideal of the “virile” subject, in ways that are congruent with feminist critiques, despite the fact that Levinas himself does not develop those possibilities.

Levinas and Heidegger

This chapter offers a comprehensive account of Levinas’s relation to Heidegger’s thought during the formative years of his philosophical development through to Totality and Infinity (1961). Heidegger’s thought informed the central problem that preoccupied Levinas during these years, namely, the rise of Nazism, Hitlerism, and the prospect of a radical collapse of civilization into barbarism and evil. It afforded Levinas a way of understanding these historical events as deep philosophical problems rather than cognitive or historical aberrations. The chapter pinpoints two very different critiques Levinas makes, a critique of Heidegger’s account of facticity and the more famous ethical critique of Heidegger’s thought. The critique of Heidegger’s account of facticity structures Levinas’s alternative account of the phenomenology of being-riveted that shapes his thinking from 1934 to Totality and Infinity and gives the ethical critique of being its philosophical traction.

Levinas on God and the Trace of the Other

Levinas takes the face-to-face relationship between each subject and every other particular person to be a relationship of the self with transcendence. He believes this dimension of our interpersonal experience is represented in traditional religious and theological texts by the relationship with the divine or God. This paper explores how Levinas’s appropriation of the Cartesian expression “the idea of infinity” introduces this divine character of the face-to-face and how Levinas goes on to develop and enrich this association of the face-to-face, its ethical character, and divine transcendence. Levinas takes the divinity of the face-to-face to refer to the universality, objectivity, normative force, and motivational attraction of the sense of responsibility he believes is foundational for human experience. In short, for Levinas, the divinity associated with morality in traditional religious texts refers to the normative weight and psychological appeal of ethics itself.

Levinas’s Philosophy of Transcendence

Commentators neglect the transcendence of fecundity in Totality and Infinity in focusing on that of the face. They thereby overlook, first, how substitution in Otherwise Than Being fulfills transcendence as an excendence and, second, how fecundity responds to Hitlerian racism’s reduction of the I to the biological body. Substitution corrects a shortcoming in the face-to-face: how can the face dispossess me if egoism defines my identity? In Levinas’s description of fecundity, the identity of ipseity, where the I is an other on the very basis of a simple identity with itself, is an essential resource for substitution in order to respond to this shortcoming. A worry arises that fecundity revives the tribalism it was meant to combat. A dialectical reading that negotiates the transcendence of fecundity with that of the face shows how the I breaks with biological ties because it cannot slip away from responsibility for others.

Theological Terms in the Philosophy of Levinas

This essay examines Levinas’s use of theological terms in his philosophical texts. References to theology and to theological claims appear throughout his itinerary, yet in his later works terms such as “inspiration”, “witness”, “glory”, and “prophecy” become central. Moreover, their meaning is organized around conceptions of infinity and God that play an important role in his argument for the primacy of the ethical relation with the other person. The latter claim proves to be framed in a philosophy of religion that is irreducible to theology. The status of these matters with Levinas’s major philosophical texts is clarified by recourse to some elements of his unpublished philosophy of language.

Levinas’s Jewish Writings

Opening with an argument to the effect that Levinas’s Jewish writings operate in the realm of the Levinasian political, this article goes on to draw out the understanding of Judaism that makes this possible, namely a Judaism concerned with law. The second half of the article is a reading of Levinas’s Talmudic lecture, “Desacralization and Disenchantment,” which clarifies this understanding of Judaism in opposition to capitalism and to a dangerously apolitical form of Christianity. This reading shows how Levinas’s Talmudic lessons articulate and develop central themes of his philosophical thinking and of his conception of Judaism.

Levinas’s Prison Notebooks

This article provides a description of and introduction to Emmanuel Levinas’s wartime notebooks (Carnets de captivité), written while he was a prisoner of war in France and then in Stalag 11B at Fallingpostel near Magdeburg, Germany, during World War II. The essay draws out from his notes the descriptions of his experience as a Jewish soldier in the camps, but it focuses also on their intellectual content. In the notebooks Levinas divides his work into philosophical, literary, and critical projects. This article traces these three trajectories in the notebooks, including his notes on Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Heidegger, and Marcel Proust, and considers their impact on his later writings, arguing that they served as a testing ground for ideas that he developed later. It considers, as well, the significance both of his meditations on Judaism in the notes and his experiments with novel writing.

Levinas and the Law of Torts

This essay considers Anglo-American tort law in light of Emmanuel Levinas’s thinking about ethics and responsibility. The piece introduces the common law’s understanding of negligence and the duty of care through a close reading of Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., one of the most famous cases in American tort law. It then critically examines the case and the leading theories of tort law—economic, corrective justice, and civil recourse—from a Levinasian perspective. It concludes by proposing a framework for a Levinasian approach to tort law, drawing on Levinas’s understanding of ethics, politics, and justice in his later period. The essay defends Levinas’s notion of justice as the activity of remaking ethics in politics, as a provisional attempt to balance competing and incommensurate demands with an eye toward achieving the moral equality persons under the law.