Addressing Levinas (review)

Addressing Levinas, edited by Eric Sean Nelson, Antje Kapust, and Kent Still, is an exciting new collection of essays on Emmanuel Levinas by Northwestern University Press. The anthology is impressive in its size and in the range of approaches it features. It boasts nineteen essays by some of leading the English-language scholars on Levinas. This sheer size will make Addressing Levinas a valuable collection for advanced students and scholars interested in Levinas. In addition, it has a number of qualities that distinguish it from other anthologies.

Addressing Levinas is comprised of essays that were originally presented at a conference on Levinas at Emory University in 1999. As mentioned, it includes pieces by some of the leading English-language commentators on Levinas, scholars who helped spearhead the interest in him in English-language universities, such as Robert Bernasconi and Alphonso Lingis, as well as pieces by up-and-coming scholars who have begun to publish monographs on Levinas, such as Jill Robbins, Tina Chanter, and John Drabinski. The ostensive theme of Addressing Levinas is "the address" in Levinas's work. It purports to explore how Levinas's readers should "address" his work given his view of philosophy as a discourse always "addressed" to the other. It is somewhat misleading, though, to depict this collection as carefully structured around a single, unifying theme. It reads like what it is: a collection of conference papers. Its essays tend to be short, ten to fifteen pages, explore Levinas's work from a variety of perspectives, and most confine themselves to offering focused claims about specific ideas in Levinas rather than sweeping overviews of him.

Far from being a flaw, however, this collection's terseness is one of its strength. Scholarship in continental philosophy tends to be somewhat rambling, not only, as critics too often allege, because of its use of jargon, but because it is so often purely exegetical. Commentators often content themselves with offering yet another compare-and-contrast type exegesis of, say, Levinas and Derrida, Heidegger, or Husserl, as if further clarifying his ideas was equivalent to defending their soundness. I do not want to belittle this scholarship. Yet one can feel disempowered by the fact that it makes up the bulk of the literature on Levinas, for it often feels as if readers are not being invited to assess the adequacy of, say, Levinas's ethics but listen in on yet another monologue that tries to clarify him. Perhaps because they still bear the stamp of being conference papers, short essays presented to live audiences, the essays in Addressing Levinas do a good job of confronting readers with clear and provocative claims.

Indeed, its authors are often disarmingly blunt. Consider an opening passage from David Wood's "Some Questions for My Levinasian Friends":

I want to pursue . . . this thought, suggesting that (1) Levinas's ethics rests on an ontology, one which is importantly flawed; (2) his relation to Heidegger is at least symptomatic of his blindness to his own ontological commitments; (3) if the climate of Levinas's thought is marked by the asymmetry of the ethical relation, we need to move on; and (4) we need to open ourselves to an other event, one in which the event of otherness explodes in many directions.

(152)

One may disagree with Wood's criticisms, but it is refreshing to have them stated so frankly and to be invited to debate not simply whether Levinas misread Heidegger but whether his ethics is flawed. It is here that the anthology best fulfills its stated intention to explore the idea of "the address." Reading the essays in Addressing Levinas, one feels like one is being personally addressed, that is, invited to join a conversation.

And the conversation is interesting. Many essays explore what are emerging as the key topics of the next generation of English-language scholarship on Levinas. Whereas scholars previously sought to clarify Levinas's overall perspective by studying his relationship to philosophic predecessors such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig, or, more recently, to clarify...