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Philosophy and Rhetoric 38.2 (2005) 173-189



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Generations:

Levinas in the Jewish Context

Department of Philosophy
Salisbury University
Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas' Postmodernism. Oona Ajzenstat [Eisenstadt].1 Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 388. $54.00, hardcover.
The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Israel among the Nations. Adam Zachary Newton. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Pp. xix + 261. $72.50, hardcover; $24.95, paperback.
Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine. Claire Elise Katz.Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2003. Pp. xvi + 199. $49.95, hardcover; $22.95, paperback.
Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities. Robert Gibbs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 400. $67.50, hardcover; $24.95, paperback.
You are the G-d of our Fathers, the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Of Sarah, Rebecca, Lea and Rachel.
—From the Amidah of the Jewish Theological Seminary Siddur

A Jewish Levinas?

What is Judaism to Philosophy and Philosophy to Judaism? That Emmanuel Levinas was deeply committed to and influenced by his Jewish heritage is agreed upon by everyone. That his philosophical arguments often turn on metaphors, allusions, and concepts taken from a Jewish context is also readily admitted. Still, many scholars currently engaged in the discussion of Levinas's philosophical project steadfastly refuse to undertake a thorough assessment of these Jewish intonations within his writing. To do so, the argument goes, would diminish the impact of his thinking by rendering [End Page 173] it either too subjective or too parochial, which is to say, too religious. Further, reference is made to Levinas's own insistence, at least in his method of publishing his texts, to delineate those that are "confessional" from those "philosophical." In striving to keep these two strands of thought separate from one another, various critics claim to be motivated by an anxiety concerning the subversion of the universal by the particular, of Philosophy by the Judaic. In doing so, they reassert the centuries-old insistence of the Enlightenment that Philosophy is a perpetual endeavor to free itself from the uncritical assumptions of faith, as well as to construct a discourse that addresses all men in the name of a universal reason, or, at least, in a telling critique of all notions of reason that fall into this or that unintended particularism. "How could the Levinasian other truly be other," one can hear in the thinking of these critics, "if he or she must be seen within the framework of Jewish metaphors and Jewish histories, not to mention Jewish religiosity?"

But how can one ignore the wealth of references to biblical, kabbalistic, and Talmudic sources running through Levinas's philosophical works? In what sense, for instance, should one take the pivotal notion of witness in Otherwise than Being, when its phenomenological context is given as my "being taken by the hair" (Levinas 1988, 149)2 such as Ezekiel is grasped in his call to prophecy? Are such passages to be read as merely decorative gestures, a helpful but superficial illustration that renders the argument of its author more palatable to his reader without actually affecting its true meaning? Or should one immediately reject any such reference, since it seemingly demands the reader's assent to a particular faith? This latter judgment would call for a reconstruction of Levinas's thought shorn from all its religious sources, while the former would call for a discounting of many of the distinctive tropes and metaphors of his writing, as if they were merely accidental features of an underlying content. But if either of these approaches reflects the intention of Levinas in regard to his project, why then is he initially so insistent in including these references, indeed in making them, at least in some cases, the very armature on which he then elaborates his philosophical analysis of responsibility and the infinite running throughout his work? Is he offering numerous citations of Jewish scripture, dutifully footnoted, because he wants his reader to discount them? This hardly seems likely.

In response to the question of the status of Judaism within the...

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