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2 Existential Appropriations: The Influence of Jean Wahl on Levinas’s Reading of Kierkegaard J. Aaron Simmons Levinas as an Ambivalent Reader of Kierkegaard Whereas Martin Heidegger is at his best when he is reading other philosophers , Emmanuel Levinas is not. Despite his early success at interpreting Husserl for a French audience,1 with his own philosophical maturity came a waning of such deep readings in favor of using other thinkers as foils or as problematically superficial points of support for his own original thinking.2 Borrowing Heidegger’s useful distinction between going counter to a thinker and going to a thinker’s encounter,3 often Levinas just goes and gets what he needs from a text whether this be positive, as in the case of his reading of Rosenzweig, or negative, as in the case of Hegel or Heidegger. If only it were this easy. When it comes to Levinas as a reader of Kierkegaard, as Merold Westphal points out in chapter 1 of this volume, we cannot just conclude that Levinas is a “bad” reader, even if there are moments when this seems to be the best possible characterization.4 Offering the examples of Levinas’s claim that Kierkegaard is preoccupied with doubt, Levinas’s notion of “immodesty,” the bizarre thought that Kierkegaard’s Abraham is motivated by an egoistic revolt against the state, and ultimately the misconception of Kierkegaard’s frozen “ethical stage” that appears throughout Levinas’s comments, Westphal admits that he suspect[s] that if Levinas applied for admission to one of our graduate programs and submitted as a writing sample an essay including these readings of Kierkegaard, we would dismiss him out of hand, shaking our heads and asking, Who taught this kid to read, anyway?5 However, at the very moments when he appears to be at his most superficial, Levinas often makes a deeply significant point about a thinker that illuminates a strikingly “good” reading.6 Consider that while Levinas tends to equate Hegel and Heidegger, he does so by obviously over-simplifying their thought and yet he simultaneously displays a deep appreciation of the trajectories in their thinking that invite such a reductive equation. Given this dynamism, even if it is often problematic, we might conclude that when Levinas gets a thinker 42 J. Aaron Simmons wrong, he frequently does so in the right way. Bad readings may still produce profitable results. However, what a sustained consideration of Levinas’s own thinking demonstrates is that we can never be satisfied with this instrumental relation to others. The ends never justify the means, but there may be times in which inadvertently certain means that would not otherwise be commended produce good outcomes. For these reasons, we should not conclude that Levinas is just a bad reader of philosophy in general, and Kierkegaard in particular, but instead merely that he is an ambivalent, or a highly selective, one. For example, Levinas often finds something helpful in a text or thinker and either pulls it out of context and stretches its meaning for his own purposes (e.g., the repeated use of the line from Dostoevsky),7 or occasionally even straw-mans an idea or a thinker in order to facilitate his own philosophical point (as, I believe, is often the case with his reading of Kierkegaard). There is perhaps no thinker for whom Levinas’s ambivalence is more pronounced than Kierkegaard. For Levinas, Kierkegaard is both the best example of a kindred spirit in the project of resisting totality and systematic philosophy, and the worst example of someone who relegates ethics to a secondary role. Both of these interpretations are understandable. Regarding the critique of totality , Kierkegaard and Levinas stand in something of a transitive relationship. Kierkegaard’s entire philosophy can be read as a contestation of Hegel’s systematic elimination of singularity. Drawing on the above example, we can see how this relationship mirrors Levinas’s own relationship to Heidegger. Given that it is hard to differentiate between Hegel and Heidegger in Levinas’s thought, we should expect to see resonances between Kierkegaard and Levinas inasmuch as they both resist the philosophical movement toward any overarching unified synthesis. To push this point one step further, Levinas claims that one of the greatest influences on his own thinking is Franz Rosenzweig. Indeed, he notes that Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption (Stern der Erlösung)8 is“a work too often present in [Totality and Infinity] to be cited” (TI, 28). Levinas reads Rosenzweig...

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