Levinas

Contemporary philosophy

The author of Totality and Infinity lived through the turbulent history of the twentieth century, from the First World War to the Second, by way of the Russian Revolution.
This thinker, standing at the crossroads of phenomenology and existentialism, revisits the concept of the Other and places it at the centre of his philosophy.
A devoted reader of the Talmud, he has inspired many contemporary thinkers.

Bibliography

Here are the essential books if you wish to better understand this author's thought:

Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (2002).
Roger Burggraeve, The Wisdom of Love in the Service of Love: Emmanuel Levinas on Justice, Peace, and Human Rights, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2002.
Richard A. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation After Levinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics, London: Routledge, 1995
Herzog, Annabel (2020). Levinas's Politics: Justice, Mercy, Universality. University of Pennsylvania Press

Biography: Life of Levinas

Youth

Emmanuel Levinas was born in Lithuania in 1906.

His family fled to Ukraine when the First World War broke out. He studied at a secondary school in Kharkov, where he discovered the great Russian authors: Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and others.

He went on to study philosophy in Strasbourg, France, for four years, attending the lectures of distinguished professors such as Martial Guéroult and striking up a friendship with Maurice Blanchot.

This was his first encounter with the study of philosophy in France.

In 1928, he spent a period studying under Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg, where he discovered phenomenology — a discipline that would profoundly shape his thinking. He devoted his doctoral thesis to the theory of intuition in Husserl's phenomenology, and did much to introduce the work of both thinkers to France, notably through his translation of the Cartesian Meditations.

Photo of Levinas — Photo of Emmanuel Levinas

The War

He moved to Paris, where he met Kojève, Gabriel Marcel and other prominent figures in the philosophical world.

He became a naturalised French citizen, married and had three children.

In 1939, the Second World War overtook him: he was called up, taken prisoner, and spent five years working in a labour camp in Hanover, Germany. It was there that he wrote his first book, Existence and Existents.

At the end of the war, he learned that most of his family had perished as victims of Nazism.

Later Years

Appointed secretary of the Alliance israélite universelle, he devoted himself to studying the Talmud while continuing his philosophical work, culminating in the publication of his major thesis, Totality and Infinity, in 1961.

This work challenged the primacy of ontology as the central branch of philosophy — a primacy that, in his view, tends to marginalise others. For Levinas, ethics is first philosophy, and it is only through this lens that the truth of the Other can reach us, through experiences such as the encounter with the face.

He went on to teach at the University of Poitiers, then at Nanterre, and finally at the Sorbonne, where he lectured for three years until 1976.

After his retirement, he taught occasional courses in Fribourg, Switzerland. He died in Paris in 1995, at the age of eighty-nine.

Main Works

The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology
Totality and Infinity
Of God Who Comes to Mind
Existence and Existents
Ethics and Infinity
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence