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Vol. 10, No.3 Spring 1992 137 Difficult Freedom: Essays onJudaism, by Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Sean Hand. London: Athlone Press, 1990. 306 pp. $29.95. This is a book that is not likely to win readers for Emmanuel Levinas. The "difficult freedom" he expounds is rendered more difficult by an inadequately explained philosophy, an awkward translation, and a poorly edited text. The more the pity, since Levinas is increasingly popular and well-regarded by many Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. The reader of this collection of essays will find it difficult to get a handle on the basic tenets of Levinas' thought, and would do well to look elsewhere for an initial orientation to it. This book starts philosophically in medias res, and it is only the final essay, "Signature," which sketches an autobiography and philosophical outlook. It is in this concluding piece that one learns that Levinas was a boy of eleven living in the Ukraine at the time of the Russian revolution, that he received most of his higher education in France, that after the Second World War he became Director of a teacher's seminary associated with the Alliance Israelite, and that from the 60s on he held professorships in various universities, culminating with the Sorbonne. Though the biography states that his life "is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror" (p. 291), Levinas refers in one sentence only to the "long captivity in Germany" which he endured, and permits himself just a single and oblique rebuke of Heidegger. Yet many of the essays constitute a philosophical and emotional response to Heidegger (and to Hegel and indeed the entire pre-phenomenological Western philosophical tradition), as well as a gut reaction to both the Holocaust and the assimilation and secularism of Jewry in modern times. Most of the essays in the book were written in the fifties, addressed to a French Jewry which was struggling to find itself existentially and Jewishly. As is evident in the final essay and elsewhere in the book, Levinas is mostly influenced by the phenomenological views of Edmund Husser!. Unfortunately, the summary treatment given to Husserl's thought, as to that of Heidegger and others, is woefully insufficient for all but those already familiar with their views, and as a consequence, Levinas' presentation of his own pOSition is hardly more intelligible. The primacy for Levinas of ontological pluralism, of difference, of otherness, is stated in "Signature" and elsewhere, but not developed. For Levinas it is the essential otherness of the person facing you which resists manipulation by language and by deed, leading you to respect and honor 138 SHOFAR the inalienable difference of individual beings. Yet the reader may well wonder at the insistence given to the "disproportion" of the relationship between the Other and the self, and to the locating of moral consciousness in this very disproportion. Particularly debatable-but not debated in the book-is .Levinas' view of individual freedom as commonly understood (a function of what could be seen as a proportionate-"Buberian?"relationship ), which for him is "murderous and usurpatory." As the bulk of the essays reveal, classical Judaism for Levinas has articulated the true meaning of freedom, one which respects the sanctity of the other and through law safeguards each one's rights. Indeed, God is understood as the paradigmatic Other, whose presence is communicated through face-to-face encounter, as recorded in the Bible; an experience considered to be beyond language, beyond history and beyond science. These are not the media through which to approach God or true being, or with which to judge Him and Judaism, for Levinas. He is scornful of philologists and of philosophers, of historians and academics in general, making criticism both too easy and impossible. Still, the reviewer may register his reservations with this sort of writing, while regretting that it is not conveyed in a more felicitous translation. The book abounds in typographical errors and poor locutions, often leaving one puzzling at the author's intention. More troubling is the translator's obvious ignorance ofHebrew and the Jewish tradition, leading him into egregious errors of literalism (pp..23, 227,.229). Many of the essays in this book...

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