Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas (b. 1906–d. 1995) was a French-Jewish thinker known primarily as the philosopher of the ‘other.’ He studied with Husserl and Heidegger in the 1920s. He introduced phenomenology to France through his translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations into French, and he developed a lifelong friendship with Maurice Blanchot. Prior to the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, Levinas’s philosophical work focused on Husserlian phenomenology. His thought took a dramatic turn in the mid-1930s when he focused on the philosophical threat of Nazism. He spent 1940–1945 in a German POW camp. Returning to Paris after the war, he immediately went back to work for the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), where he became director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale (Enio), the Jewish day school. He resumed working on his question from the 1930s—the philosophical problem of identity and transcendence—with an added urgency in the wake of World War II. From 1946 until his death in 1995, Levinas’s ethical project searched for a way to address this philosophical problem of escape, developing a view of the self as an ethical subject that allows one to transcend the self without leaving the body behind. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, he developed the first version of his ethical project. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he responded to criticisms of that early work. Central to Levinas’s description of the ethical relationship are references to literary works including Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare. Although Levinas was an observant Jew, the biblical narratives, in addition to being part of a sacred text, also serve as rich sources of examples for the philosophical descriptions of the ethical relationship he develops. Levinas is not obviously identified with literary theory—not in the way that Derrida is, for example. He did become popular within literary theory circles in the 1990s and might be taught more frequently in comparative literature departments than in philosophy departments, especially in the United States. His friendship with both Blanchot and Derrida had a significant impact not only on their thinking but also those who whose work was influenced by them. References to terms like the other/Other, the trace, hospitality, ethics, and alterity found throughout Blanchot and Derrida, and now more commonly in literary theory, can be traced back to Levinas’s ethical project.