Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy

by Salomon Malka, Michael Kigel (Translator), Sonja M. Embree (Translator)

"Emmanuel Levinas, one of the twentieth century's most eminent ethical philosophers and religious thinkers, introduced to French philosophy the idea of the other as the rupture of the same, the idea that was to become the foundation of late twentieth century continental thought. Originally published in French, Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy provides the only in-depth biography to appear in English of this interesting thinker, whose influence has only continued to grow since his death in 1995." "Salomon Malka, a journalist and student of Levinas for three decades, devoted five years to the researching and writing of this biography, which details Levinas's childhood in Lithuania, his prewar years in Paris, his studies with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, his years as a German prisoner of war during the Holocaust, his paneling at the Vatican and in the streets of Tel-Aviv, and his teaching career at the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale and the Sorbonne in Paris." "Using an investigative approach and emphasizing Levinas's Jewish thought, Malka puts Levinas's friendships with Maurice Blanchot and Jean Wahl in perspective while also discussing the teachings of M. Chouchani, the enigmatic talmudic scholar and mathematician. Levinas's later relationships and dialogues with important philosophers and religious thinkers, including Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida and Pope John Paul II, are also discussed." This informative biography, which contains eight pages of photographs, follows the ascent of Emmanuel Levinas from solitary thinker to one who is universally influential, and includes personal accounts of his family, friends, colleagues and students. It is essential reading for all those interested in Levinas and his thought, but also for anyone who wishes to better understand contemporary continental thought and its foundations and implications.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography

367 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Alyosha · Rating 3 out of 5]

The issue of biography, encompassing as it does the entwined problems of life and of writing, is central to philosophy, especially in the last century or so. As Kierkegaard once wrote, “sophistry is to be found in the distance between what one understands and what one is. The person who does not enter into the character of what he understands is a sophist.” To what degree does the life of the philosopher impact the philosophy that they think and write? And what about the inverse question, of the import of the thought on the life? Life is no longer viewed in opposition to some eternal ideal – the illusion has been dispelled, replaced by other, more finely woven illusions – and so one cannot necessarily divide the body from the thought. Levinas provides a particularly thorny example, as his life was one of privacy and seclusion, in comparison to a figure such as Derrida, as well as the more important factor, that his thought is an ethics – a thought that speaks to our way of living, with the other. For if the man himself does not live this thought, then why should any other? There have been countless cases of philosophers who have failed to live by their own ethics (one may think immediately of Schopenhauer), and in such a case the life seems to negate or refute the thought, devaluing it and rendering it meaningless – the philosophy devolves into mere sophistry.

Malka does his best to explicate this thorny path, to tread it, and though he was a friend and student of Levinas, he is no philosopher. The biography of a philosopher is slippery – the life can at times be trumped by the thinking and the writing, the life seeming little more than a vehicle for the latter workings. The writer must thus be able to move within the subtleties of the thought and writings in question, able to weave the latent lines from the nodes in the thought back to the life which spawned them. Malka provides some great anecdotes from Levinas’ life, as well as some excellent quotations from interviews that he conducted, but in the end this work lacks the essential connecting thread between the life and the thought. One can sense it, at times, woven just below the surface, and yet it remains most times a missed opportunity. At other times it seems to emerge from the weaving of the narrative, like a thread that rises before submerging once more in the woven wave of the biotextile. But the thread is never fully followed, never pulled from its complex weave to be analysed. Unlike Benoit Peeters’ work on Derrida, or François Dosse’s on Deleuze and Guattari, Malka’s work leaves the reader desiring more from the philosophical element of Levinas’ life – an aspect that was surely just as great as that of his Judaism, which is, in the end, bound up inextricably with the philosophical element as well. The two elements are not really distinct, but are rather shades of a single thought, a single life.

This is one of the key aspects of Levinas’ thought and life that Malka highlights – the blurring of the distinction, the undecidability, of any attempt to define Levinas’ thought as either Jewish, philosophy, or even as Jewish philosophy. This arises because the thought in question is a thought of a rupture – a rupture in the totalizing thought of the One, the self. It is a thought of exile, thought in exile, without any home in which to settle into stasis or comfort. It is a thought that bears witness, which wanders endlessly, never to achieve any completion or sense of stable presence. In this sense alone, as a thinking from out of the desert – the thought of human existence as a wandering in the desert of existence, thinking from out of this nomadic trial – that Levinas’ thought might be considered a Jewish philosophy. The two apparent sides interpenetrate each other, and are inextricably interwoven. But one must take heed, for mobilizing such a descriptor involves much danger, for it is not naively that such a statement of determination may be let stand. We would first have to work through how Judaism infects and interpenetrates this philosophy, undoing it and uprooting it from its very foundations in the philosophical tradition. Such a task is certainly beyond Malka and this work – he offers but a sign, like the Delphic oracle, by way of a life. For it was through this life, thinking this thought and attempting, time and again, the anguish of saying this very uprooting of language and thought from itself, that Levinas experimented with this very thinking and saying. For Levinas’ thought and writings are, in a sense, nothing but this attempt to come to grips with this intertwined origin of Greece and Jerusalem, of philosophy and Judaism, which manifests itself daily in the experience of human existence, of the I confronted with the emergent exigency of responsibility towards the other. The thinking of this radical intersection of being Jewish (further explicated by Blanchot in his phenomenal essay of the same name), and the exigency of ethical responsibility in the life of each and every one of us – a demand which philosophy heretofore had been unable to come to terms with, yet which Judaism presented in its primal insistence – this is the expression, if such can be so summarily expressed, of both Levinas’ writings and of his life.

It is this ethical demand, to think and to live, that is bequeathed unto us all – to take up and respond to the call of the other, to their destitution and their ever approaching death which are always in our hands, and so to uproot ourselves from the dominion of the self, setting ourselves to wander, to exist otherwise – closer to the divine heart of this desert existence, which in itself speaks to the outside, the ex, which is fostered in the conjoined sayings of exigency, exegesis, existence, ecstasy, and exile.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ce livre minable n'est pas une biographie d'Emmanuel Levinas. Il ne raconte pas l'histoire de sa vie. Également il n'analyse pas l'évolution de la pensée du grand philosophe. Ce qu'il fait est de partager avec le lecteur ses propres souvenirs de Levinas et ceux des autres personnes dans le cercle de Levinas que l'auteur connaissait.

"Levinas, la vie et la trace" est donc une collection d'anecdotes ceuillies par un proches de Levinas. Le livre a quelques bon moments mais dans l'enemble il décoit énormément

[Gareth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work is a good companion for those studying Levinas who wish to know more about the man himself and the life he led. Whilst it does not penetrate too deeply into the thought of the man, this isn't the task it has set itself and so it provides a welcome relief but from the perplexities of analysing Levinas's deepest thoughts by providing an exploration of the life lived.

[Artur Rosman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great impressionistic view of Levinas, his work, and his life. It's not a traditional biography. That's why I'd recommend it.