ABSTRACT
The widely influential ethical thinker Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95) was placed by circumstance in the midst of Kierkegaard’s reception in the interwar French philosophical scene. A key inheritor of the phenomenological tradition as practiced by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and an important transmitter of their thought to a French-speaking audience, Levinas was also influenced by Kierkegaard, though to a degree that is a matter of debate. While he clearly knew something of Kierkegaard’s works (and again there is some debate as to exactly how familiar he was with the whole sweep of Kierkegaard’s corpus,1 though he responds directly to Fear and Trembling, and there is some textual evidence that he was at least acquainted with some of the non-pseudonymous writings),2 his reaction to Kierkegaard was notoriously ambivalent. Recent Englishlanguage scholarship has argued for greater affinities between the two than Levinas
1 Merold Westphal, the pre-eminent scholar of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Levinas, remarks: “Levinas writes as if he had never even heard of Works of Love, much less read it. But he does seem aware of the Climacus writings, to which he makes apparent reference.” Merold Westphal, “The Many Faces of Levinas as a Reader of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion, ed. by J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 2008, p. 22. See footnote 27 below for Levinas’ explicit reference to Climacus’ Philosophical Fragments. Samuel Moyn points out in private correspondence with this author that Levinas was reviewing books about Kierkegaard when he was only 30 years old and, due to the influence of Jean Wahl (18881974), was arguably reasonably familiar with Kierkegaard’s works. It is also quite certain that Levinas read Wahl’s massive Études kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Aubier 1938), which he wrote about in published essays that are referenced in the next section, and Lev Shestov’s (1866-1938) Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle (Paris: Vrin 1936), his review of which is mentioned below. 2 I discuss the textual evidence for familiarity with the non-pseudonymous writings at the conclusion of this article. Levinas did leave an archive, but it is inaccessible, and so it is impossible to say what his notes might include by way of reference to Kierkegaard. Levinas also participated in a television program entitled “Le mystère Søren Kierkegaard,” produced by Denis Huisman and Marie-Agnès Malfray for the French channel TF1 and broadcast November 23, 1977, but it can to my knowledge only be viewed at the “Centre de consultation” of the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, located at the Bibliothèque nationale e). This article therefore
himself acknowledged and has fostered increased critical attention to the issues orbited by both thinkers.3
