Levinas and the Wisdom of Love: The Question of Invisibility

Notes

Notes 133 Introduction 1 All texts by Levinas will be cited with abbreviations. See the list of abbreviations on page xi and following. Chapter 1 1 This title is given by some since he is considered to be the founder of objective history. This is, of course, disputed, and he is even called the “father of lies” by some since it is not widely agreed that his histories were factual. 2 Herodotus, Here Are Set Forth the Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus; That Men’s Actions May Not in Time Be Forgotten nor Things Great and Wonderful, Accomplished Whether by Greeks or Barbarians, Go without Report, nor, Especially, the Cause of the Wars between One and the Other, ed. Harry Graham Carter (New York: Heritage Press, 1959). 3 See Alain Finkielkraut, The Wisdom of Love, vol. 20, Texts and Contexts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). See also Roger Burggraeve, The Wisdom of Love in the Service of Love: Emmanuel Levinas on Justice, Peace, and Human Rights, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2002). Burggraeve’s book was not available when I was first reviewing the literature and writing the first draft of my manuscript. I only discovered his work after completing my own, and while I was pleased to find this fine piece of scholarship arguing for the possibility of Levinasian politics that is not fundamentally violent, I found that there were some significant points of disagreement , some of which I will identify here. 4 Finkielkraut, Wisdom of Love, 90–91. 5 Burggraeve, Wisdom of Love in the Service of Love, 140. 6 Finkielkraut, Wisdom of Love. 7 Burggraeve, Wisdom of Love in the Service of Love, 143. 8 In this book, I draw from texts from across the breadth of the Levinas corpus with the exception of the Jewish works. I originally did this because I think the interpretation I offer can be made without them, and I sought a primarily philosophical audience. But I find these works to be rich and valuable, and were I to now include them, it would only strengthen my argument. 9 Tamra Wright, The Paradox of Morality (New York: Routledge, 1988), 168–70. 10 Perhaps this deserves further treatment at some time in the future, but such a project exceeds the scope of this current book. Chapter 2 1 Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 5, 70. 2 Davis, Levinas, 37–38. 3 Robert Gibbs, “Review of Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas by Richard Cohen,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2002). 4 Perhaps his method of writing is not dissimilar to that of Flannery O’Connor as self-described when she wrote to a playwright friend, Maryat Lee, in a 1959 letter that the “thing to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in the stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well.” Flannery O’Connor and Sally Fitzgerald, The Habit of Being: Letters (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 349. 5 Davis, Levinas, 71. 6 Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, ed. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 312. 7 Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity, 1st ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 71. 8 Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6. 9 Davis, Levinas, 57. 10 “La philosophie: sagesse de l’amour au service de l’amour” (AE, 207). 11 Levinas is not systematic in his writing style, so he does not always offer clear definitions for terms, but where possible, I will try to provide statements that, if not completely definitional, at least provide traits or descriptions which are suggestive of a definition. 12 For connections between ‘wisdom of love’ and ‘the third’ see also PJL, 104 and UN, 195, where we see that the introduction of the third is the beginning of philosophy as the wisdom of love. 134 Notes to pp. 6–15 13 Although the uppercase “Other” usually denotes “autrui” (the personal or particular ‘Other’) and the lowercase ‘other’ usually denotes...