For You Alone

Emmanuel Levinas and the Answerable Life

Terry A. Veling

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781610977173
  9781498214568
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630872243
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The works of Emmanuel Levinas, a survivor of the Nazi horror, are striking in the constancy of their thought and the strength of their appeal. We are not condemned to evil and hatred; rather, we are called to be-for-each-other. For You Alone explores the relational and religious quality of Levinas' work. Our lives are always twofold rather than "one and the same." A relational life is dependent on encounters that are revelatory. Revelation means that life is no mere sameness but is tied to the revelation of the other, to you. Here is transcendence par excellence. Here is what the name of God signifies, the relational and ethical bond that takes us outside ourselves toward the other in our midst. What could be more natural, more human, or more divine than to speak of the relational quality of life? An answerable life means that we are asked after, called, required. "Here I am under your gaze," Levinas writes, "obliged to you, your servant. In the name of God."

1

Introduction

“Jerusalem Writings”

With the appearance of the human—and this is my entire philosophy—there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other.

—Emmanuel Levinas

A Life

Levinas was born in 1906 to Jewish parents in Lithuania.1 His father owned a bookshop, and he was introduced to the great authors of Russian literature (such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy). He also learned to read the Bible in its original Hebrew and grew up in a climate of enlightened Jewish orthodoxy. In 1923 he moved to France and studied philosophy under Husserl and Heidegger, whose works he is credited for introducing to French thought. He became a French citizen and in 1932 married his childhood sweetheart, Raïssa, a talented musician. They had two children, Simone and Michael. For many years Levinas served as director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), a school established to train Jewish teachers in the Mediterranean region. The Levinas family resided in an apartment above the school, where he and Raïssa lived until 1980.

Levinas was not well known in the French philosophical scene until the publication of his first major work, Totality and Infinity, in 1961, at the age of fifty-five. In the 1980s he began to attract attention as a rising star in Europe. Nevertheless, he was always anxious that his thinking and his themes never be turned into slogans; he would decry any movement that might be built around his name, such as “the Levinas Fashion.”2

Levinas lost his parents, brothers, and parents-in-law in the Nazi genocide. As a French army officer, he was spared deportation to the concentration camps and placed in a prisoner of war labor camp, where he spent five years as a woodcutter in the forest. He recounts a story from this period about a friendly dog named Bobby. When returning to the camp after a day of labor, he and his fellow prisoners would face the glares and insults of the villagers and prison guards, who saw them as nothing more than dirty Juden. Bobby, however, befriended them. “When we used to come back from work,” Levinas says, “he welcomed us, jumping up and down . . . This dog evidently took us for human beings” (IRB, 41; DF, 151–53).

Levinas’ wife and daughter escaped the Nazi death machine with the help of his lifelong friend, Maurice Blanchot, and “found refuge and protection among the nuns of St. Vincent de Paul” (TN, 163). Though he writes rarely of these horrific times, the memory of the Shoah has always accompanied his thinking. “It is dominated,” he wrote, “by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror” (DF, 291). He dedicated his second major work, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, to the memory of the victims of Nazism and to “the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man,” along with a Hebrew dedication to his lost family members, “that their souls may be kept in the bundle of life.”

Aside from his philosophical works, Levinas also wrote widely on Jewish themes, including various collections of his own Talmudic commentaries. He credits his Talmudic learning to an enigmatic and myster-ious teacher, Chouchani, a genius and master of Talmud who influenced Levinas in the postwar years, but of whom little is known (IRB, 73–79). As one commentator notes, when you open Levinas’ books, “you will find phrases or paragraphs without references and without footnotes, but which, while reading them, you can feel are fundamentally Jewish thoughts.”3

Among Christian thinkers, Levinas had a special relationship with the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and with Pope John Paul II. He was regularly invited to the pope’s summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, on the outskirts of Rome. Paul Ricoeur, who also attended these gatherings, recalls, “The pope attended the discussions twice a day, remaining completely silent. He would invite us to share a meal. On one of these occasions, Levinas said, ‘You sit at the pope’s right, and I’ll sit on his left . . . A Jewish philosopher and a Protestant philosopher sitting with the pope!’”4

The only time Levinas did not attend the pope’s gatherings was in the fall of 1994. Ricoeur recalls that, at the time, “he was filled with the pain of his wife’s death,” and the pope took Ricoeur aside and asked him, “Would you please give my regards to Levinas and tell him of my respect and admiration.”5

John Paul II read Levinas’ work and saw him as “the model of a great Jewish thinker.”6 Similarly, Levinas had a deep appreciation for the pope’s religious vision. John Paul II’s conception of the human being “as an opening onto the divine” resonated with Levinas’ moral vision of the face-to-face relation.7 “From the human, we very quickly get to God,” Levinas was once heard to say; “Besides, this is the incarnation.”8

Levinas died on December 25, 1995, the eighth day of Hanukkah. Levinas’ son, Michael, recalls: “It was in the morning. He didn’t feel well. It was eleven o’clock. I lit the last Hanukkah candle, he took the prayer book, he kissed the book, he kissed my hand, we left for the hospital and he passed away a few hours later.”9

Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida offered eulogies to their venerated friend, to this man of “question-prayers.”10

A Survivor’s Question

Levinas is a survivor. He survived the death of millions. He survived what his friend Maurice Blanchot calls the “countless cry . . . the utter-burn where all history took fire.”11 He survived the death of his mother, his father, his brothers, his wife’s parents. He survived, and yet deeply inscribed within his thought there lies the penultimate question that plagues virtually every survivor: What right have I to survive, to live, when so many have died? “In starting from the Holocaust,” Levinas says, “I think about the death of the other man; I think about the other man for whom one may already feel—I don’t know why—like a guilty survivor” (IRB, 126).

In his philosophical writings, Levinas transforms this question of survival into the very question of being. The burden of survival—what right do I have to be, to live—becomes the very burden of being: How is being justified? (IRB, 97, 163).

Levinas then takes this question of being and makes it an ethical question at the very outset (OS, 48, 92). It now becomes: What right or justification do I have to be in the face of the other person’s suffering and death? This is Levinas’ primary question.

The burden of survival and the question of being could only be answered for Levinas when, as he says, “the burning of my suffering and the anguish of my death were able to be transfigured into the dread and concern for the other man” (BV, 4). For Levinas, existence for itself is not the ultimate meaning; rather, it is existence for the other. The only justification for surviving, for living, for being, is when the anxiety over my own life and death are transfigured into concern for the life and death of my neighbor. “The human is the possibility of being-for-the-other. That possibility is the justification for all existing” (TN, 112). This is Levinas’ primary response to his question. This is his subject matter, what matters most to him.

In raising this concern for “my neighbor,” Levinas often speaks of the “face of the other.” In language resonant with the Hebrew Scriptures, he refers to the other as “the Most High” to evoke the other’s transcendence and eminence, yet he also speaks of the other’s lowliness and destitution—“the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.” The other is both the “Most High,” the Holy One, and the face of the neighbor—the stranger and the vulnerable one. When speaking to Christian audiences, he often referred to chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel, “in so far as you did this to one of the least . . .”He writes, “The relation to God is presented there as a relation to another person. It is not a metaphor; in the other, there is a real presence of God. In my relation to the other, I hear the word of God. It is not a metaphor. It is not only extremely important; it is literally true. I’m not saying that the other is God, but that in his or her face I hear the word of God” (IRB, 171).

“Jerusalem Writings”

In 1998 I traveled to Jerusalem with Mary and our four sons. We rented an apartment on a hill in a neighborhood called Ramat Eshkol. We arrived late at night and...

Table of contents

• For You Alone
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part One: For You Alone
• 2 “Jerusalem Writings”
• 3 Indifference
• 4 Under Your Gaze
• 5 For You Alone
• Part Two: The Talmudic Ocean
• 6 Sociality
• 7 The Talmudic Ocean
• 8 “We Will Do and We Will Hear”
• 9 “Love Your Neighbor as Yourself”
• 10 Suffering for Nothing or Suffering for You
• Bibliography