Levinas and Theology

Nigel Zimmermann

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780567248671
• eBook ISBN: 9781472554581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is of increasing importance for those working in the diverse fields of phenomenology and continental philosophy, French studies, Jewish studies, ethics, politics and religious studies. In this book, Nigel Zimmermann gives proper attention to the 'incarnate' aspect of the 'other' in Levinas' work, providing a theological reading that explores the basic strands of Levinas' thinking regarding the concrete nature of human living. Human communities, in which politics inevitably plays a crucial role, may learn much from the theological shape of Levinas' philosophy. In all his writings, Levinas cannot be understood apart from his roles as a Talmudic commentator and as a radical thinker who suffered personally under the shadow of the Holocaust.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Provocation of Levinas

La dimension du divin s’ouvre à partir du visage humain.

Emmanuel Levinas

Totalité et infini, Sect 1., B. 6

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the creative minds of the twentieth century. His contribution is counter-intuitive, and sits uneasily within established patterns of previous scholarship. The above words indicate Levinas’ turn towards the other – the Other – in which, for him, the notion of divinity is witnessed in its trace. Levinas’ thought is a provocation not simply to conceptual debate or reflection, but also to ethical responsibility. It has been some time now since he passed away, but his influence has in fact grown, and not only among scholars. This is true, even as a new century develops its own ethical challenges and moral outrages, and the human condition carries onwards in a disparaging lack of critical self-awareness or ethical reflection. With the expansion of Levinas’ influence, it is important that theologians feel capable of addressing his thought with a degree of informed awareness. In what follows, this book offers a humble avenue for theologians to explore in gaining some framework in which to read and address the provocation made by Levinas.

It is helpful to note that during his own lifetime, Levinas did not make the ‘splash’ enacted by others around him, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet, as they both attest, Derrida’s deconstructionism and Sartre’s existentialism owe much to Levinas. Other thinkers owe similar debts to Levinas; John Paul II, Paul Ricœur, Jean-Luc Marion, Kevin Hart and others have drawn on Levinas’ complex thought to aid in what, broadly, can be called the ‘task of theology’. Having made such a general observation, it must be acknowledged that Levinas cannot easily be cushioned into the latter phenomenological and post-Husserlian categories that arose in the latter half of the twentieth century. He was not a deconstructionist. He was not an existentialist. Neither was he a nihilist. Yet he has tendencies in these categories that may better be understood in relation to his Jewish heritage, which remained both private and concrete throughout his life. He had a faith that did not lose sight of either its textual roots in the Torah or the Talmud, or the new vision his philosophy opened up onto God and the world. Levinas certainly saw himself as a phenomenologist, although even that is in dispute among some (see the debate about the ‘theological turn’ fostered by Dominique Janicaud and others).

Of centrality to reading Levinas is that his thought cannot be understood apart from his experience of World War II. In the Holocaust, he lost close family and friends, and his wife and daughter were only spared because of the intervention of Maurice Blanchot and the holy lies of nuns who hid Jews in a Catholic cloister; namely the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul in Prelfort. The terrible events of the Shoah affected every thinker who survived it, and no less so than the person of Levinas. Yet, his work is not in itself a philosophy of the Holocaust. Rather, it is a creative response to the horrors he witnessed, and an attempt to think otherwise than the kind of philosophy which, for Levinas, made the Holocaust possible. One text that was never finished, and which has only recently become available, is a novel Levinas began called Triste Opulence [Sad Opulence], later renamed Eros. Even in its incompleteness, it is a provocative read. In this unusual foray into fiction, Levinas is acutely aware of the complexity of erotic desire and the reduction of dignity that occurred in each of the persons who suffered or lost their lives at the hands of German National Socialism. In an unnerving example, he depicts a train cabin carrying Jewish men towards a Nazi camp. Despite their entrapment and the sufferings they are already experiencing, their minds are presented as resisting a complete capitulation to the moment of present confinement. Out of the window they spy hanging a woman’s undergarments, on display next to her home. As the train travels briskly onwards, the men witness a glimpse of this enticing scene, and they take to the window to leer and allow their imaginations to wander. This jars for the reader of the narrative. It seems somehow sickening that men in such circumstances could be distracted from their plight and seek something so unpromising as the faint imaginings of sexual gratification. Of course, the desire is fantastical, and the obstacles between the men and the woman are great; she is unknown and unheard, she may be married and off limits, it must be assumed that at least some of the men themselves are married and that none of them, under any circumstances, will even meet her.

Furthermore, the men are trapped not just by the walls and locks of the train cabin, but also by the incorporation of bureaucrats and soldiers into a broader systemic intrigue. The State itself had become the oppressor, and so the sudden erotic impulse, so closely aligned with sexual longing, is prevented from any possible fulfilment. The train carries on, even if imagination remains in the moment in which the men’s eyes witness an object of enticement. Because the narrative of the Holocaust is so well known, a reader might be sickened to think of these men as they approach suffering and certain death, being distracted by an impossible dream. Nevertheless, Levinas’ text spends a little time on the scene to illustrate a profound truth that is too easily overlooked; the excessive humanity of the men in question. These suffering men, while treated as subhuman, remain human to excess. Their humanity is surplus to the entrapment in which they find themselves, and is witnessed in the event of their imaginative longings. The men, in their embodied humanity, refuse the limits of their oppressors. Levinas, therefore, insists on his own refusal to implicate the men entirely into the anthropological categories of their oppressors, which of course see in them nothing but an animalistic, cancerous inhibitor of Germany and Europe’s progress. Despite the Nazi persecution of these men, they remain fully human, which includes their sexual appetites and immature desires after that which will never be attained. Perhaps the non-attainability of the desire itself is a peculiarly human trait. The authentication of their humanity occurs in the sudden grip of sexual longing they experience, which exceeds the limitations of the present situation and therefore refuses the descriptions issued by their captors.

In Eros, Levinas explores his account of alterity, which is an otherness that cannot be circumvented – even by a train carriage journeying to genocide – and which means to convey the irreducibility of the other human person. The notion of humanity’s excess is a repeated point of departure in Levinas’ philosophical works, and it challenges the categories and formulations of Western philosophy in its traditional expressions. In this book on Levinas and theology, it is not argued that Levinas does anything so transient as to attempt a revolution in the way we think, but instead offers a phenomenological description of human inter-subjectivity that, in form and intention, stirs up an ethical response. Theologians, like any other readers, may well construct conceptual language to refuse the import of Levinas into their thought, but in no way can he be ignored with impunity. Furthermore, it will be argued that theologians may find in Levinas a provocation to work more rigorously within their own broad tradition, and to exploit the richness of theology as it sits uneasily in the contemporary academy. After all, the present intellectual context is hardly a naturally hospitable frame of reference for theology, and its practitioners must bear in mind the character of modernity, described by Rémi Brague as the ‘retreat of the sacred’.¹ Theologians already work in a context of unsettled foundations and fractured presuppositions, and so a critical reading of both their own tradition and the practice of their discipline can create a healthy self-critical awareness.

To read Emmanuel Levinas is to be unsettled. His work unsettles philosophical orthodoxies and provokes the Western intellectual tradition at its foundations. That provocation is not the violence of one who shakes that tradition for the sake of it. He is not a vandal who destroys the work of his fathers or digs up the vineyard of his ancestors. On the contrary, Levinas learns a great deal from Plato and Aristotle, just as he is inspired by Husserl and, in turn, Heidegger. In the end, he saw himself as a philosopher just as they understood themselves to be philosophers. Even in his turn from Heidegger, Levinas invokes fundamental insights from the tradition so that his provocation might not be the stuff of vandalism and juvenile dismantling, but rather that of a mature judgement on the approach to Being. That judgement is both profound and staggering in its consequences. That is to say, it is a profoundly creative and interesting proposal as well as qualitatively far-ranging. For Levinas, Western philosophy has encumbered itself with an intransigent commitment to the category of Being to the detriment of the Other. The suffering other – the poor one, the widow, the orphan – is a subjective presence who appears before the self across a vast array of non-quantifiable difference. This difference is formed through the alterity of the other person who issues an ethical demand to one’s own self that is, for Levinas, absolute.

Because Levinas’ critique of philosophy is fundamentally far-reaching, theology cannot claim innocence of his charge. Theology falls within Levinas’ sway as much as any other discipline. In fact, Levinas specifies theology as a problematic branch of thinking more than once. Because his claims continue to make their presence felt among a new generation of thinkers, theology owes to him an attentive attitude. We are invited to read his works carefully and open our theological concerns to the ethical questions Levinas generates. That does not mean a wholesale adoption of Levinas’ thought; uncritical readings of Levinas will not do. It will be shown that theologians have argued for deficiencies in Levinas’ phenomenological reading of the Other which carry a certain gravitas. Some of these are considered in the present work. Indeed, theology is a discourse with a long pedigree and is owed an attentive receptivity for its own resources in thinking through the challenge of Levinas. As Levinas opens up the possibility of describing the ethical relationship with an openness to the Other, theology rediscovers the alterity that provokes its own progress and renewal. To put it more markedly, theologians may read Levinas’ accounts of the ‘God’ who comes to mind, and in turn become more acutely aware of the radical claims made in the God of ‘revelation’, to which their work is largely addressed. Theology may not only be re-formed through Levinas, but also be re-sourced and re-schooled by its masters.

Levinas is known as a French Jewish thinker, but his roots cannot be forgotten. He was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, a place besieged by the Nazis, the Communists and breathing freely once again in the confused liberties after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His birth date was 30 December 1905 according to the (then used) Julian Calendar, which falls on 12 January 1905 in the Gregorian usage. His youth took him to both Russia and back to Lithuania, before his relocation to the French university city of Strasbourg in 1923. In his traditional Jewish upbringing, he was called Emanuelis Levinas, later Westernized as Emmanuel Lévinas in his adoption of French citizenship and culture. According to biographer Saloman Malka, Levinas, along with his two younger brothers Boris and Aminadav, was privately tutored in Hebrew and practised an austere but not overly zealous religiosity; they attended synagogue, ate kosher and observed Shabbat and holy days.² In such a context, Levinas took to Russian literature (especially Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Gogol) and culture, without any diminishment of Judaism as a lived religion. Russian was his first language and it was spoken in his family home, but he took to others with enviable skill: German, English, Yiddish and French.

In looking briefly at Levinas’ early life, it might be noted that Levinas disliked the ‘pathos’ of biographies. He held a certain disdain for the dramatic re-presentation of one’s own life in the written word, for its necessary truncation of the complexities of a human life as it was lived and experienced, and had little patience for biographical discussions in interviews about his thought. Nevertheless, it remains informative to consider his personal history to a certain degree. The young Jewish Lithuanian, who was known to be intellectually gifted, linguistically accomplished and culturally well-mannered and hospitable, was the very image of educated middle-class aspiration. And it was the combination of these very gifts that took Levinas from his beloved Lithuanian homeland to France as a young man with dogged and joyful commitment. In 1928, having studied philosophy and giving himself to France (‘It is Europe!’), Levinas travelled to Freiburg for the lectures of Edmund Husserl.³ The father of phenomenology was by that stage in his later years and his younger student Martin Heidegger was filling lecture halls with enthusiastic devotees. Husserl’s phenomenological method remained of great intrigue for many, but it lacked the urgency of new enquiry that Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) inspired. As Levinas put it, ‘I went to Freiburg because of Husserl, but discovered Heidegger’.⁴ Nevertheless, Levinas’ brilliance was appreciated by both Husserl and Heidegger and he became a private guest and a respected visiting student, even at an early stage.

In 1930, Levinas became a French citizen and performed his duties in military service, as well as marrying Raïssa Levi, whom he had known since childhood. Although by this stage he had completed his license in philosophy, he took a teaching position at the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris rather than a university position. A number of essays appeared in print in the next few years, but none of them marked him as a radical or original thinker to the degree hailed by contemporaries like Jean-Paul Sartre. However, in 1935 his first thematic essay, ‘On Escape’ in Recherches Philosophiques appeared, representing an important witness to his attempt to break with Heidegger.⁵ That same year his daughter was born and nothing of great consequence was published until much later.

The intervention of war brought great misfortune to Levinas’ family. He was drafted into the French army as a translator in 1939 and taken prisoner of war in Rennes with the Tenth French Army in June 1940. For a number of months he was a captive in a Frontstalag before being transferred to a camp in Fallingpostel, not a great distance from Magdeburg in the German north. As an officer, Levinas was held in a military prisoner’s camp rather than in a concentration camp, inducted into forced labour alongside his co-prisoners in camp number 1492. He often commented that this was the same number as the year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain. As a Jew, he was separated from non-Jewish prisoners and wore the insignia JUD on his uniform. As the years of the war went by, he was allowed limited correspondence with his wife, and he wrote much which was never completed. The trials of the period should not be underestimated, and in fact Levinas’ wife and daughter were only saved by the intervention of friends including Maurice Blanchot, and the Religious Sisters of a Vincentian convent, as well as being provided for by a living allowance from Levinas’ employers at the private school at which he taught, the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO). Sadly, members of his family were murdered in the Nazi pogroms which began in the June of 1940, helped by the collaboration of some Lithuanian nationalists.⁶

With the end of the war in 1945, Levinas was released and he returned to Paris. Through the intervention of a friend, he was made the Director of the ENIO. His family remained in an apartment above the school until 1980 when they moved to another apartment in the same street. In Levinas’ biography, there is a constant hint of a rich domesticity that disliked great interruption or change, a privacy which remained all the more mysterious by its hospitality to others. By all accounts, the Levinas marriage was a happy and contented one, hiding an interiority unreachable by those on the outside but insistent in its care and attention to visitors and friends. It was in this setting, after the war, that Levinas met Henri Nerson, a local doctor, and became his close friend. In turn, Nerson introduced Levinas to Monsieur Chouchani who became a teacher to the young philosopher (and now school administrator). Chouchani is the nickname for an otherwise anonymous rabbi who became a towering intellectual figure, greatly influencing a number of Jewish thinkers of that generation (e.g. Elie Wiesel). Chouchani spent time in Israel and Paris and died in Uruguay where his grave reads, ‘[t]he wise Rabbi Chouchani of blessed memory. His birth and his life are sealed in enigma’. His identity and biography is a contested topic, but Levinas admitted towards the end of his life that Chouchani had made a great impression upon him. It appears that Levinas and Nerson had taken to meeting with Chouchani weekly for Talmudic studies, despite the latter’s description as dirty, unattractive and rather like a vagabond.

Earlier, in 1931, Levinas had co-translated Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations into French with Gabrielle Pfeiffer, only 2 years after the completion of his doctorate on Husserl’s theory of intuition. Indeed, his thesis had won a prize from the Institute of Philosophy and published by Vrin in 1930. Following the war, Levinas’ career did not follow any classical or logical academic sequence, but there is no doubt that the experience of war, loss and bereavement marked Levinas interminably. As a teacher and administrator, Levinas’ time was limited, but he retained a commitment to regular Talmudic reflections and written commentaries, as well as public meetings and smaller study groups. Between 1946 and 1947 Levinas gave a series of four lectures at the Collège Philosophique at the Sorbonne, which were subsequently published as Time and the Other.⁷ We know from his Talmudic commentaries that Levinas continued to learn from his ‘master’, Monsieur Chouchani, with whom he studied between 1947 and 1949, and during which time it appears that the latter actually lived in Levinas’ apartment.⁸ In 1947, Levinas published the work he had written sporadically throughout th...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The First Test
• 2 Being’s Other
• 3 ‘Would You Like to Do a Bit of Theology?’ Levinas and the Theological Turn
• 4 The Disturbance of Theology
• 5 Preferring the Shadows: The ‘Little Faith’ of Israel
• 6 The Return of God?
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Biblical References