Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Difference

2. On Buber

32 Emmanuel Levinas 32 TWO On Buber EmmanuelLevinas François Poirié — Speak, if you will, about Martin Buber. I believe you knew him. Emmanuel Levinas — Yes, I knew him personally after the war. My interest in the intersubjective relation, my principal theme, is often united with the philosophy of Buber, who distinguished the I-Thou, the relation between persons, from the I-It, the relation of man with things. The relation to the other man is irreducible to the knowledge of an object. Certainly, Buber entered this field of reflection before me. When one has worked, even without knowing it, in a field that has already been prepared by another, one owes allegiance and gratitude to the pioneer. I do not refuse these to Martin Buber, even if in fact it is not by starting out from the Buberian oeuvre that I have been led to a reflection on the alterity of the Other,1 to which my modest writings are devoted. Gabriel Marcel too came to the same reflection quite independently. I do not know if he recognized Buber’s paternity, though he spoke quite openly of parentage. I am therefore very close to the Buberian theses, despite the flash of genius [éclat de genie] in his books and the poetic potential of his expression, which is very inspired. His thought is universally known and has exercised a tremendous influence throughout the world. A multifaceted genius, moreover, Buber has devoted to Hasidism — which is altogether strange to me — a considerable oeuvre that all but introduced Hasidism to the European sensibility. He has written tales and novels in which his philosophical thoughts are also expressed. On Buber 33 I read somewhat late his great book I and Thou, a fundamental book in which the interpersonal relation is distinguished from the subject-object relation in a very convincing and brilliant manner, and also with a great deal of finesse. The main thing [la grande chose] that separates us — or the minor thing [la petite chose] (when one speaks of someone to whom one draws near, one often says: “In minor things, there are some differences between us”) — the principal thing [la chose principale] separating us is what I call the asymmetry of the IThou relation. For Buber, the relationship between the I and the Thou is directly lived as reciprocity. My point of departure is Dostoyevsky and his phrase [. . .]:2 “We are all culpable for everything and for everyone before everyone, and I [moi] more than the others.”3 The feeling that the I [Je] owes everything to the Thou [Tu], and that its responsibility for the Other is gratitude, that the other has always — and by right [de droit] — a right [un droit] over Me [Moi], indeed, everything I have said [. . .] about this “I” (“je”) submitted to obligation , this “I” commanded in the face of the Other — with the double structure of human misery and the word of God — all that represents perhaps a theme that is fundamentally [foncièrement] different from that which Buber tackles. I do not wish to develop this point further; I intend to reedit soon a text on my relationship with Buber. I believe I have been able to call attention to several points of difference between us. But the central thing that determines the difference between my way of speaking and Buber’s is the theme of asymmetry. I have read Buber then with a great deal of respect and attention, but I have not reached the point of agreeing with him. I will tell you about something I read recently that really astonished me, a text of Buber’s relative to his biography. There is an encounter with an old, very pious Jew, who poses a question to Buber relative to 1 Samuel 15:33, where the prophet commands King Saul to efface from the map and from History the kingdom of the Amalekites, who in the biblical and Talmudic tradition are the incarnation of radical evil. Were not the cowardly Amalekites the first to attack the Israelites coming out of Egypt, slaves who had only just 34 Emmanuel Levinas been freed? We are not discussing either history, or historicity. The meaning of biblical hyperbole is to be found in the proper context, whatever may be the distance between the verses! There is in Deuteronomy 25:124 the following: “When the Eternal, your God, will have rid...