Distribution of Guwy interview with Levinas.1. Bio-bibliography; totality vs. infinity. See link to Levinas bibliography on left of this blog.
Emmanuel Levinas was born in Kaunas, or Kovno, Lithuania, in 1906, and died in Paris in 1995. He becomes a student at the University of Strasbourg in 1923, aged 18, and in the course of his studies does a semester in Freiburg, where he met and studied briefly under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and Martin Heidegger, who became much better known after 1927, when he published Sein und Zeit, or Being and Time, in which he developed his Existenzphilosophie, or philosophy of existence, later known as existentialism, a term used by a the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Levinas defended his thesis at the University of Strasbourg in 1930. It was titled The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. In France in those days one did two theses, the "little thesis," and then a state thesis, which made one aggrégé, basically a state employee of the university system. But to do so you needed time for further study, and a reading knowledge of classical Greek, and to pass not an exam, but a "concours" or competitive exam in which only the top contenders or "winners" were accepted, according to the number of vacancies. Levinas did not have the money for that. Another factor may have been his desire to remain close to Judaism. He chose instead to take a job as student supervisor, petty adminsitrator and part-time teacher of philosophy at the AIU (Alliance Israélite Universelle). I have here a copy of Les Cahiers, which is the name of their official publication, dated 1996, in which a former student (Ami Bouganim) under Levinas there wrote a piece tited "Lévinas Pédagogue," a short excerpt of which I translate here. In this passage, Bouganim describes a Sunday course on Rashi, open to the general public and not yet very large. "A pupil, seated in front of him, with his back to the public, would read the text, and this great admirer of Rashi took a mischievous pleasure in covering no more than two or three verses in an hour to show the richness of the Torah, and to savor at leisure the genius of its commentator. He took delight in commenting on the text, surprised at rediscovering with us what in a sense he was putting into it. A magician of meaning, for the glory of Rashi and our happiness." Bouganim then proceeds to quote (from memory, apparently) what he calls "that key phrase." "In order for the permanent values of Judaism, contained in the great texts of the Bible, the Talmud and their commentators, to be able to nourish our souls, they must again nourish our minds." Of the authors Bouganim read with Levinas in the philosophy course he says, "those writers Monsieur Levinas presented to us have not ceased soliciting us. Those encounters seemed to say that even when doubts had invaded everything and an eclipse passed over God, and we found ourselves without a sky above our heads, we could still inhabit the texts.... Monsieur Levinas encouraged us, in the spirit of Maimonides, to take to philosophy the better to come to terms with our Jewish perplexity..."
When Levinas was taken prisoner (1940-1945) and sent to a work camp as a woodcutter in the Black Forest with other French Jewish soldiers (Levinas had been serving as a German interpreter in the French army) , he discovered to his horror on his release that his two younger brothers and both parents had been murdered in Lithuania by Nazi collaborators. His wife Raïssa (the daughter of his neighbors in Kovno, whom he had married in 1935) and his daughter Simone had been hidden by his friend Maurice Blanchot in a convent, and survived. Shortly after the war Levinas had a son, Michaël, who is now a noted French composer who lives in Paris. Levinas returned to working at the A.I.U., and was made director of the École normale israélite orientale (E.N.I.O.), a school whose mission was mainly to educate Jews from North Africa. He lived in the 16th arrondissement in Paris, in Auteuil, close to the school.
There are several works extant on Levinas's biography. The most thorough is Emmanuel Levinas by Marie-Anne Lescourret, apparently not yet translated (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), and Soloman Malka, Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). Levinas eventually taught at Nanterre (1967-1972), and then Paris IV (1973-1976), till his retirement. He spoke at Johns Hopkins University, visited Canada on one occasion, went to Switzerland to participate in yearly meetings with Christian theologians. By and large, however, it is my view that he was never particularly comfortable in the academic world by the time it became open to him. His most intense and perhaps happiest intellectual moments seem to have been in writing philosophy books and essays and in company of close friends. He seems not to have been much stimulated by polemics. But I will say no more in a systematic way about Levinas's life for the moment, though I may return to it casually from time to time as it relates to the subject matter, because I would like us to use our time focusing on Levinas's philosophical thought itself.
Levinas's two major theses are Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974)The Greek vs. the Judaic side of his writings, and their interrelatedness.Talmudic Readings. Hegel (1770-1831) and the Totality--Closure, finitude, system, organic whole, organism.The notion of Infinity--Openness, endlessness, אין סוףWhat is at stake for Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), and then for Emmanuel Levinas in the difference between these two terms? Subjectivity.
