In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Emmanuel Levinas:The Rhetoric of Ethics
  • Claire Elise Katz

Emmanuel Levinas was born in 1906 in Kovno, Lithuania, a country where, as he explains, "Jewish culture was intellectually prized and fostered and where interpretation of biblical texts was cultivated to a high degree."1 In 1915, at the age of eleven, Levinas and his family moved to the Ukraine, when the Jews of Lithuania were expelled by the government. In 1923 he left for France and enrolled in the University of Strasbourg, where he studied under a number of prominent professors including Charles Blondel, Maurice Halbwachs, Maurice Pradines, Henri Carteron, and Martial Gueroult. It was Blondel who introduced Levinas to Henri Bergson, whom Levinas credits as influencing his own conception of time. Pradines was teaching a course on Edmund Husserl. And it was here that Levinas developed a lifelong and life-saving friendship with Maurice Blanchot. Importantly, many of those who taught Levinas had been adolescents at the time of the Dreyfus affair, the residue of which lingered in France when he arrived to study.

Levinas spent the 1928 and 1929 academic year in Freiburg to study with Husserl; while there he also studied with Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time had just been published in 1927. Levinas's translation of Husserl's Sorbonne lectures—the Cartesian Meditations—introduced France to phenomenology. In 1930 he became a naturalized citizen of France and in this same year he began teaching at the Alliance Israélite Universelle du Bassin Méditerranéen, an organization whose goal was to spread Jewish education in the Mediterranean countries. In 1947, he was appointed the director of the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale, a branch of the Alliance, thus demonstrating his early commitment to Jewish education, a commitment that continued until the end of his philosophical career.

Levinas is considered one of the preeminent philosophers of the twentieth century. By reconceiving and reevaluating how we understand the [End Page 99] other and our relationship to the other, he transformed the landscape of ethical theory. In contrast to much of the history of modern philosophy, Levinas grants a privileged status to the other. He claims that while the received view of the ego, or the "I," is one that emphasizes its perseverance, or its conatus essendi, in fact, our relation to the other actually tells a different story. In Levinas's view, there are any number of examples that illustrate the interruption of the conatus and that demonstrate the "ego's" possibility to sacrifice itself for the other.

One of the most striking elements of Levinas's ethical project is his overturning of the modern subject. Modern philosophy linked the subject's responsibility to its freedom: one needs to be free in order to be held responsible. Levinas inverts this relationship in a manner that undercuts the free/not free distinction altogether. In Levinas's account of responsibility, the subject's obligation to the other is not chosen, nor can it be chosen. We cannot recuse ourselves from our obligation because it is not something that we chose in the first place.

Levinas's work influenced scholars as diverse as literary theorists, philosophers, feminist theorists, and scholars of Jewish studies and rabbinics. Additionally, his work influenced how we think about aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The influence of his work is in part due to the novel manner in which he presents concepts to ideas. In many cases, these concepts have had traditional meanings that Levinas has either inverted or, more interestingly, placed emphasis on their literal meanings. In other cases, his work continues to fascinate us precisely because of the tropes, ranging from the seemingly banal—"the face"—to the exotic—"hineni"—to which he introduces us. In all cases, his work challenges us to read more closely and more sensitively than we might otherwise do with philosophical texts and the ideas in his work encourages us to return to them with fresh eyes and new perspectives. The essays collected in this issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric are devoted to examining Levinas's project within the context of the rhetorical play at work in his writings.

Diane Perpich's paper takes on the task of uncovering "the...

pdf