ABSTRACT
Levinas’s combination of Judaic culture and phenomenological training produced a philosophy based on the primacy of ethics which, in the wake of structuralist determinations, has assumed increasing importance and influence. Born of Jewish parents, Levinas frequently drew on the moral lessons contained in writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who were his earliest reading. After studies in Strasbourg, his first publications were essentially an importation of the lessons learned, first from Husserl and then from Heidegger, into French philosophy. This period, running from 1930’s The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (La Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl) to Existence and Existents (De l’existence à l’existant) of 1947 and Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger (En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger) from 1949, already harbours the idea which is to assume increasing importance and radical expression in Levinas’s philosophy: the ethical confrontation with the other, whose existence is subordinated to philosophical representation and existential mastery. This preconditional obligation to be for-theother rather than for-itself leads to two publications which are among the most important philosophical works in French of the postwar period: the 1961 Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini) and 1974’s Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence). In the first, Levinas contrasts the closed and masterful system of philosophical intentionality with the infinity opened up in consciousness by the face-to-face relation: instead of grasping this appearance of the other and absorbing it into a total intelligibility, I must respond to the ethical demand which its apparition produces in me. The implications for a philosophical language no longer devoted to thematization and reduction, and the re-
sponse, articulated notably by Derrida, that this non-conceptual approach in itself constituted a concept and made sense only within the terms of a philosophy it sought to break open, in turn led to the remarkable Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Levinas replaces the concept of otherness with the more immediate and less definable notions of neighbour and proximity, and moves from a scrutiny of the face to an attentiveness to the generous and responsible act of saying, a gesture that establishes immediate contact, exposes me to the other and resists the silence of intellectual mastery. In keeping with this, he also transforms the words and modes of his own philosophical communication: his earlier descriptions of eros now become his basic means of expression, the high point being the chapter on substitution, with its scandalous evocation of torn skin, exposure and obsession, passivity and persecution. The ethical dimension of such passivity is for Levinas guaranteed by the absolute ethics, or obedience to the Most High, of God’s law. For Levinas, God is not the reintroduction of absolute rule, however, but the constant revelation of absolute alterity within the human situation. In similar vein, Levinas’s concept of justice is based on the possibility of embodying a prophetic morality which must by its nature lie beyond the machinery of state and politics.
