Emmanuel Levinas
(1906 - 1995)
Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most interesting European thinkers in the 20th Century. He is Jewish and grew up in Russia, studies philosophy with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg, fights with the French Army against the Germans, looses his family to the Holocaust, and is captured by the Nazis, but survives. After the war, he eventually becomes a professor at the Université de Paris Nanterre. He writes many books in his later life, and teaches at the Sorbonne as well. He integrates phenomenology, ethics, metaphyscis, and theology in a unique way, but it takes energy to understand him. He is also trying to re-think and re-interpret the European history of ideas in light of a deep sense of justice and peace.
For him, philosophy does not originate in metaphysics, but in a sense of obligation that arises from the encounter with the Other ("the face of the Other'), and develops into a form of ethics that he calls "first philosophy."
His Life
(Quoted from the Stanford Encyclopedia)
1906 Born January 12 in Kaunas (or Kovno, in Russian), Lithuania. Lithuania is a part of pre-Revolutionary Russia in which the then surrounding culture ‘tolerates’ Jews. He is the eldest child in a middle class family and has two brothers, Boris and Aminadab.
1914 In the wake of the War, Levinas's family emigrates to Karkhov, in the Ukraine. The family returns to Lithuania in 1920, two years after the country obtains independence from the Revolutionary government.
1923 Goes to study philosophy in Strasbourg (France). Levinas studies philosophy with Maurice Pradines, psychology with Charles Blondel, and sociology with Maurice Halbwachs. He meets Maurice Blanchot who will become a close friend.
1928–29 Levinas travels to Freiburg to study with Edmund Husserl; he attends Heidegger's seminar.
1930 Publishes his thesis in French, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology.
1931 French translation, by Levinas, of Husserl's Sorbonne lectures, Cartesian Meditations, in collaboration with Gabrielle Peiffer.
1932 He marries Raïssa Levi, whom he had known since childhood.
1934 Levinas publishes a philosophical analysis of “Hitlerism,” Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.
1935 Levinas publishes an original essay in hermeneutic ontology, On Escape, in the Émile Bréhier's journal Recherches philosophiques (reprinted in 1982).
1939 Naturalized French; enlists in the French officer corps.
1940 Captured by the Nazis; imprisoned in Fallingsbotel, a labor camp for officers. His Lithuanian family is murdered. His wife Raïssa, and daughter, Simone, are hidden by religious in Orléans.
1947 Following the publication of Existence and Existents (which Levinas began writing in captivity), and Time and the Other that regrouped four lectures given at the Collège Philosophique (founded by Jean Wahl), Levinas becomes Director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale, Paris.
1949 After the death of their second daughter, Andrée Éliane, Levinas and his wife have a son, Michael, who becomes a pianist and a composer.
Levinas publishes En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (selections of which appear in 1998 as Discovering Existence with Husserl).1957 He delivers his first Talmudic readings at the Colloque des Intellectuels juifs de Langue française. A colloquium attended by Vladimir Jankélévitch, André Neher, and Jean Halpérin, among others.
1961 Publishes his doctorate (ès Lettres), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Position at the Université de Poitiers.
1963 Publishes Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism.
1967 Professor at the Université de Paris, Nanterre, with Paul Ricœur.
1968 Publishes Quatres lectures talmudiques (English translation in Nine Talmudic Readings).
1972 Humanism of the Other.
1973 Lecture at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne.
1974 Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, the second magnum opus.
1975 Sur Maurice Blanchot (no English translation).
1976 Proper Names.
1977 Du sacré au saint (English translation in Nine Talmudic Readings).
1982 Of God Who Comes to Mind, Beyond the Verse and the radio conversations with Philippe Nemo, Ethics and Infinity.
1984 Transcendance et Intelligibilité (English translation in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings)
1987 Outside the Subject, a collection of texts, old and new on philosophers, language, and politics.
1988 In the Time of the Nations.
1990 De l'oblitération: Entretien avec Françoise Armengaud (no English translation); a discussion about the sculpture of fellow Lithuanian, Sasha Sosno.
1991 Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. An issue of the prestigious Les Cahiers de L'Herne is dedicated to Levinas's work.
1993 Sorbonne lectures of 1973–74, published as God, Death, and Time. The annual colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle publishes a volume devoted to him.
1994 Raïssa Levinas dies in September. Levinas publishes a collection of essays, Liberté et commandement (no English translation) and Unforeseen History, edited by Pierre Hayat.
1995 Alterity and Transcendence.
Emmanuel Levinas dies in Paris, December 25.
1996 New Talmudic Readings (published posthumously).
1998 Éthique comme philosophie première (no English translation, published posthumously).
The Face of the Other: Quotes
The following selection of quotes illuminates what Levinas means by “the face of the Other.” First, what does he mean by "face," and by "other?"
“Other” (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) usually translates the French word autrui, which means “the other person,” “someone else” (i.e., other than oneself). It is thus the personal other, the other person, whoever it is, that each of us encounters directly or experiences the traces of every day. Of course, we encounter a multiplicity of others, but Levinas more often uses the singular “other” to emphasize that we encounter others one at a time, face to face.
By “face” Levinas means the human face (or in French, visage), but not thought of or experienced as a physical or aesthetic object. Rather, the first, usual, unreflective encounter with the face is as the living presence of another person and, therefore, as something experienced socially and ethically. “Living presence,” for Levinas, would imply that the other person (as someone genuinely other than myself) is exposed to me and expresses him or herself simply by being there as an undeniable reality that I cannot reduce to images or ideas in my head. This impossibility of capturing the other conceptually or otherwise indicates the other’s “infinity” (i.e., irreducibility to a finite [bounded] entity over which I can have power). The other person is, of course, exposed and expressive in other ways than through the literal face (e.g., through speech, gesture, action, and bodily presence generally), but the face is the most exposed, most vulnerable, and most expressive aspect of the other’s presence.
The face is a living presence; it is expression. . . . The face speaks. (Totality and Infinity 66)
Expression, or the face, overflows images. (Totality and Infinity 297)
The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure. . . . It expresses itself. (Totality and Infinity 50-51)
. . . the face is present in its refusal to be contained. (Totality and Infinity 194)
The face resists possession, resists my powers. (Totality and Infinity 197)
. . . the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation . . . (Totality and Infinity 198)
[T]he face [is] a source from which all meaning appears. (Totality and Infinity 297)
The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation. (Totality and Infinity 201)
[T]he Other faces me and puts me in question and obliges me. (Totality and Infinity 207)
[T]he face is what forbids us to kill. (Ethics and Infinity 86)
In front of the face, I always demand more of myself. (“Signature” 294 in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism)
The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. . . . [T]here is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance. The face is exposed, menaced. . . . (Ethics and Infinity 86)
The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity--its hunger--without my being able to be deaf to that appeal. (Totality and Infinity200)
[T]he Other manifests itself by the absolute resistance of its defenceless eyes. . . . The infinite in the face . . . brings into question my freedom, which is discovered to be murderous and usurpatory. (“Signature” 294 in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism)
. . . the face presents itself, and demands justice. (Totality and Infinity 294)
In the face the Other expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends. (Totality and Infinity 262)
What we call the face is precisely this exceptional presentation of self by self. (Totality and Infinity202)
Expression, or the face, overflows images. (Totality and Infinity 297)
The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. . . . The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure. . . . It expresses itself. (Totality and Infinity 50-51)
The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes, according to Plato’s expression, to his own assistance. He at each instant undoes the form he presents. (Totality and Infinity 66) The face is present in its refusal to be contained. (Totality and Infinity 194)
The face resists possession, resists my powers. (Totality and Infinity 197)
. . . the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation . . . (Totality and Infinity 198)
. . . the face brings the first signification (Totality and Infinity 207)
[T]he face [is] a source from which all meaning appears. (Totality and Infinity 297)
Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language. (Totality and Infinity 206)
The face, preeminently expression, formulates the first word: the signifier arising at the thrust of his sign, as eyes that look at you. (Totality and Infinity 178)
The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation. (Totality and Infinity 201)
[T]he Other faces me and puts me in question and obliges me. (Totality and Infinity 207)
Access to the face is straightaway ethical. . . . There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity. It is the most destitute also: there is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance. The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill. (Ethics and Infinity 85-86)
The first word of the face is the “Thou shalt not kill.” It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face of the Other is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all and to whom I owe all. (Ethics and Infinity 89)
In front of the face, I always demand more of myself. (“Signature” 294 in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism)
[T]he Other manifests itself by the absolute resistance of its defenceless eyes. . . . [i.e., “The other person manifests himself by the absolute resistance of his defenceless eyes.”] . . . The infinite in the face . . . brings into question my freedom, which is discovered to be murderous and usurpatory. (“Signature” 294 in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism)
This gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving (as one “puts the things in question in giving”)--this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face. The nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as “You” in a dimension of height. It is in generosity that the world possessed by me--the world open to enjoyment--is apperceived from a point of view independent of the egoist position. The “objective” is not simply the object of an impassive contemplation. Or rather impassive contemplation is defined by gift, by the abolition of inalienable property. The presence of the Other is equivalent to this calling into question of my joyous possession of the world. (Totality and Infinity 75-76)
[An] infinite resistance to murder, . . . firm and insurmountable, gleams in the face of the Other, in the total nudity of his defenseless eyes, in the nudity of the absolute openness of the Transcendent. (Totality and Infinity 199)
. . . the face presents itself, and demands justice. (Totality and Infinity 294)
The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity--its hunger--without my being able to be deaf to that appeal. Thus in expression the being that imposes itself does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness. . . . The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no “interiority” permits a voiding. . . . The will is free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes; it is not free to refuse this responsibility itself; it is not free to ignore the meaningful world into which the face of the Other has introduced it. (Totality and Infinity 200, 201, 218-19)
The being that presents himself in the face comes from a dimension of height, a dimension of transcendence whereby he can present himself as a stranger without opposing me as obstacle or enemy. (Totality and Infinity 215)
In the face the Other expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends. (Totality and Infinity 262)
"It is not without importance to know—and this is perhaps the European experience of the twentieth century—whether the egalitarian and just State [and its politics] in which the European is fulfilled … proceeds from a war of all against all—or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other." (“Peace and Proximity,” 1984.)