Re-Reading Levinas, and: Nine Talmudic Readings (review)

154 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31 .*1 JANUARY 1993 his earliest years was consumed by the Kantian project of exhibiting the conditions of the possibility of science and committed to the Kantian ideal that comprehensive understanding be grounded in the principles of logic. The primacy of science and logic were internal to his philosophical vision and he himself was a central figure in the late nineteenth-century advances in these domains. While he certainly would not have shared its speculative prohibitions, the early twentieth century's preoccupation with science and formal logic would certainly have been congenial. On a more general level, the rejection of the visionary role of philosophy in favor of a more specialized investigation of mundane matters is a traditional philosophical reaction to a period of speculative excess. One need only remember Locke's "underlaborer" conception or Hume's critique of unbridled reason. The early twentieth century's realist reactions both in England and America to the excesses of speculative idealism quite naturally would favor the specialized piecemeal study over the speculative synthesis. The development of ideas is driven internally as well as externally. These features of the historical reality occupy center stage in other stories. C. F. DELANEY Universityof Notre Dame Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, editors. Re-Reading Levinas. Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 199x. Pp. xvii + a52. Cloth, $39.95. Paper, $14.95. Emmanuel Levinas. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington , IN: Indiana University Press, 199o. Pp. xxxix + 197. Cloth, $u9.95. Emmanuel Imvinas (b. 1906) is one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century. His two major philosophical works are Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwisethan Being orBeyond Essence (1974). Both are centered on the significance of intersubjectivity , the former emphasizing ethics and alterity and the latter emphasizing language and subjectivity. Levinas's "Jewish writings," written from 1935 to the present, are just now appearing in English translation. Difficult Freedom(1963, 2nd ed. 1976), translated by Sean Hand, and Nine Talmudic Readings, impeccably translated by Annette Aronowicz , both appeared in 199o. Nine Talmudic Readings is comprised of the celebrated keynote lectures on Talmud Levinas has been giving since 1957 at the Colloquia of French-Speaking Jewish Intellectuals at the annual Paris meeting of the World Jewish Congress. The nine are taken from 1963 to 1975, but the selection is Levinas's own, inasmuch as it combines two French collections, Four Talmudic Readings (1968) and From the Sacredto theHoly (1977). I will indulge in citing my own "blurb" from the book jacket: "Levinas's wise and revelatory Nine Talmudic Readings are in the great Jewish tradition of aggada and midrash. His vision into the uplifting and very real demands of ethics and justice enables Levinas to speak authoritatively as both a philosopher and a Jew. This book is timely and timeless; I cannot recommend it too highly." Levinas speaks authoritatively because of his profundity and erudition. He speaks BOOK REVIEWS 155 as philosopher and Jew because the philosophical and religious aspects of his work are in harmony. They are in harmony because his thought is based neither in epistemology nor in aesthetics but in an "ethical metaphysics," to use Edith Wyschogrod's felicitous expression. Philosophy, for Levinas, is premised on an ethical responsibility to respond to the alterity of the other person. On first glance, nonetheless, talmudic readings seem better suited to religion, more precisely to the yeshivah, than to philosophy with its commitment to universality. How are they philosophical? Derrida answered this question in his a964 essay on Levinas, "Violence and Metaphysics ": "[T]he messianic eschatology from which Levinas draws inspiration.., is developed in [his] discourse neither as a theology, nor as a Jewish mysticism (it can even be understood as the trial of theology and mysticism); neither as a dogmatics, nor as a religion, nor as a morality. In the last analysis it never bases its authority on Hebraic theses or texts. It seeks to be understood from within a recourse to experience itself." Actually, the recourse is not to "experience itself" but to what Levinas calls "experience par excellence," ethical experience, encounter with the transcendence of the other. What Levinas uncovers in...