Emmanuel Lévinas: A Brief Introduction

English-speaking biblical scholarship would do well to allow itself to be cross-fertilized by the French intellectual tradition to a greater extent than has so far been the case. Have you read anything by Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Ellul, Jacques Lacan, or Emmanuel Levinas? I was introduced to all of them while a student at the Waldensian Theological Seminary in Rome.

We read these giants in French or in Italian translation. It is immensely preferable to read Lévinas in a Romance language. There are bigger names than Lévinas, like Barthes, Derrida (who gave one of the eulogies at Lévinas’s funeral), and Foucault. But if I had to choose, I’d rather read something by Lévinas than by the names just mentioned.

The best gateway in English into the Lévinasian world: here. In French: here. In German: here.

Emmanuel Lévinas received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania where he was born (January 12, 1906). He studied Talmud again after WW II, and taught and eventually directed the École Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris. It is impossible to understand his thought apart from its rootedness in Jewish tradition. Yet the tradition Levinas draws from is by no means limited to that passed on in a traditional yeshiva. As stated in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “The history of Jewish philosophy, from Philo and Sa'adya Gaon to Maimonides, and then from Cohen to Rosenzweig, alone clarifies Levinas's strategies and figures.”

Lévinas is (also!) a western philosopher in the strict sense. A student of Edmund Husserl, he developed a philosophy which, like that of Husserl, is phenomenological and descriptive in nature. Lévinas describes the face-to-face encounter in which one person is called by another and responds to that other. As stated in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

For Levinas, intersubjective experience, as it comes to light, proves ‘ethical’ in the simple sense that an ‘I’ discovers its own particularity when it is singled out by the gaze of the other. This gaze is interrogative and imperative. It says “do not kill me.” It also implores the ‘I’, who eludes it only with difficulty, although this request may have actually no discursive content.

Lévinas’s two most important works are Totalité et infini: essai sur l'extériorité (1961) and Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence (1974); in English, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, respectively.

I don’t see how a biblical scholar can avoid these works. In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas develops the following figures: “obsession,” “persecution,” “recurrence,” “too tight in its skin,” “exile,” “maternity,” “love,” “expiation,” and “kenosis.” A key quote: “there is substitution for another, expiation for another. Remorse is the trope of the literal sense of sensibility. In its passivity is erased the distinction between being accused and accusing oneself” (Otherwise than Being, 125).

An article by Lévinas entitled “De la lecture juive des Ecritures” appeared in the Dominican journal Lumière et Vie 144 (1979) 5-23. Translated by Joseph Cunneen, it appeared in Crosscurrents 44 (1994/95) 488-505 under the title “The Jewish Understanding of Scripture.” For the full text, go here. Here is a choice quote:

The apparently naive or superficial elements of talmudic texts should always be approached with an expectation of wisdom. There are examples of similar arbitrariness - which misled Spinoza, who was so severe with the rabbis - in the way the exegesis of the rabbis connected verses whose surface meanings seemed to have nothing in common, except, say, a similar word or verbal assonance. This freedom of exegetical thinking leads into worlds enclosed within the texts - worlds that a strict reading, aiming only at what is immediately signified, would not suspect lie behind the signifiers which, at first glance, carry all the weight of dead letters. But who is to say where their death begins and their life ends? Is it not legitimate to take as the context of each verse the totality of the canon, and help verses that seem unacquainted with each other to wake each other up? The rapprochement, seemingly coerced, between the scattered elements of Scripture, shines forth in a mode of thought that conducts its scrutiny by the secret light of hidden worlds. Suddenly, our world, imbedded or lost in signs, is illuminated by an idea that comes to it from outside, or from the other end of the canon, revealing new possibilities for exegesis which had somehow become immobilized in the letters of the text.

Lévinas died on December 25, 1995.

Comments

[Jeremy]

I enjoyed this post very much John. Levinas as well as the other folks that you mentioned are read regularly at places like Emory and Princeton Seminary, employed in several Semeia volumes and much North American post-holocaust biblical studies (esp. Linafelt). I see Levinas and these other thinkers having more of an impact in certain circles of Northern American and UK biblical scholarship than among German scholarship. I'd be interested in learning of French or Italian biblical scholarly circles that employ these thinkers.

[David Reimer]

This gives me a chance :) to plug a friend's book, Levinas and Theology ... not "normal" biblical studies fare, to be sure!

[JohnFH]

Jeremy,

It's good to know that Levinas is receiving attention in more than one context in the English-speaking world. His concepts have the potential of becoming a koine, or common language, among philosophers, ethicists, and theologians.

Todd Linafelt is a class act. We presented together during a session at last year's SBL meeting in DC.

[JohnFH]

David,

the book you link to looks very interesting. If you were to review it for the readers of this blog, I'd be pleased to post it.

[theologien]

Interesting. Good post, hopefully it will stir up some interest.

When I did my Masters about 15 yrs. ago I "discovered" Levinas while doing some work for a professor in the education department. I couldn't get any of the biblical and systematic prof's to even look at his work.

Now this department is full of people who claim the intellectual tradition of these French thinkers, although sometimes I wonder if they really understand Levinas.

[JohnFH]

You have a very interesting blog, theologien.

Anyone who puts Levinas alongside Augustine, Luther and Calvin among their favorite authors, and V for Vendetta among their favorite films is my kind of guy. We may have been separated at birth.

[David Reimer]

@John - thanks for the invitation (and for this blog!), but I'm quite sure that's one review I won't be writing!

Meanwhile, this paper of Mike's could be of interest here, as it visits some lament Psalms with Levinas as tour guide.

[Phil Sumpter]

Levinas is someone I want to spend more time getting into. I've mainly come accross him in Christian philosophical work, usually in conjunction with the Catholic philosopher J-L Marion (e.g. Bruce Ellis Benson's Graven Ideologies).

The quote sounds like midrashic exegesis. Interestingly, despite Childs' desire to read the texts 'canonically', he criticises such reading methods. In his 'Critique of Recent Intertextual Canonical Interpretation', he has a go at G. Steins' kanonisch-intertextuelle Lektüre on theological grounds, namely that it conceives 'canonical context' “as a monolithic, unstructured theological construct from which intertextual resonances can be freely garnered” (179). The midrashic approach, exemplified above by Levinas, is contrasted to allegory, which represents a more Christian mode of biblical appropriation: "While midrash works at discerning meaning through interaction, allegory ... finds meaning by moving to another level beyond the textual. It seeks to discern meaning by relating it referentially to a substance (res), a rule of faith, or a hidden eschatological event. Christian exegetical use of intertextuality moves along a trajectory between promise and fulfillment within a larger christological structure" (182,3).

A commentator on my post on the theological nature of the current crisis in biblical studies cited Ricoeur, who says something similar to Levinas here.