Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (review)

Samuel Moyn's book is a valuable contribution to the growing revisionist body of literature concerned with Levinas. Working against a hagiographic presentation of Levinas as the philosopher of the other which often relies solely on post-war writings, Moyn seeks to demonstrate how, far from returning to a traditional Judaism in the wake of Heidegger's complicity with Nazism, Levinas actually developed an idiosyncratic version of a supposedly Judaic message that in reality relied on the amendment of contemporary discourses emanating from Protestant theology. The stress is thus on the work and circumstances up to the publication in 1961 of Totalité et infini. In effect, this approach sustains two narratives, the first relating in detail to historical involvement, the second relating more assertively to the circumstantial development of an ethics, an approach which occasionally becomes slightly inquisitorial. In six main chapters, Moyn firstly places Levinas in the inter-war context of philosophy at Strasbourg, emphasizing the influence of Bergson and mentioning Levinas's enthusiastic reception of Husserl and especially Heidegger, in order to conclude that there is at this stage no hint of ethical intersubjectivity in Levinas's basic adherence to post-Kantian trends (perhaps unsurprising in a twenty-four-year-old student). The second chapter focuses on the superseding of Husserl by Heidegger and on the work of Heidegger's students, notably Löwith and Arendt; while the third, centred on the 'crisis' of Heidegger's Rectorship in 1933, assesses Levinas's contemporary pieces on the philosophy of Hitlerism and De l'évasion, but also usefully focuses on Levinas's review, published in 1934, of Lavelle's La Présence totale. The key fourth and fifth chapters, which give space to often overlooked figures, such as Jean Wahl, argue that Levinas appropriated parts of Rosenzweig, about whom he remained circumspect, as well as the contemporary Protestant thematics of the 'wholly other' derived from Barth and Kierkegaard, in order to fashion a way out of Heideggerian ontology that in practice involved a Barthian and neo-Kierkegaardian radicalization (and therefore distortion) of Rosenzweig. The final main chapter therefore downplays the significance of the Holocaust for the formation of Levinas's post Heideggerian philosophy, since the essential transforming elements, relating to a Kierkegaardian other, had already been put in place by the end of the 1930s. Thus the move in De l'existence à l'existent from abstract existence to concrete existent supposedly already gives the essential thesis of the eventual Totalité et infini. Moyn's explicit desire to restore 'contingency' to the overall reception of Levinas will hopefully have an immediate effect in those campus contexts where a thematically singular Levinas is introduced to give an ethical makeover to a huge variety of subjects and positions. By the same token, the book should also oblige readers of Levinas to acknowledge the degree to which his mature work was grounded in the ambiguous and fluid philosophical politics of the 1930s, as much as in those of the 1960s.