Totality and Infinity at 50

Notes

271 NOTES NOTES TO INTRODUCTION / DAVIDSON AND PERPICH 1. Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy, trans. Michael Kigel and Sonja M. Embree (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 267. 2. Levinas earned his Doctorat d’Université from the University of Strasbourg in 1930 for a single thesis on The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Philosophy. The more prestigious Doctorat ès Letters required the submission of two theses and qualified the recipient for a teaching position in a French university. By the 1950s, the Doctorat ès Lettres was renamed the Doctorat d’Etat, with little change in the work required except that by then it had become more acceptable for a significant body of work comprised of several essays or articles to replace one of the theses. 3. As an émigré from Lithuania, Levinas did not come up through the unique set of academic institutions that typically produced France’s philosophical elite. He did not take the entrance examination that would have qualified him to study at the École Normale Supérieure or the Sorbonne, nor, after his getting his Diplômes d’études supérieures (the equivalent of an American bachelor’s degree) at Strasbourg, did he sit for the Agrégation exam that would have qualified him to teach in a French lycée or high school. In the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Simon Critchley notes, “In private conversation, Levinas admitted that his ignorance of Greek prevented him from sitting the Agrégation” (xvii–xviii). This is somewhat puzzling since Greek became optional for the Agrégation in 1911 and Levinas could have substituted German. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Alexandre Koyré and Alexander Kojève, both Jewish émigrés like Levinas, did not sit the exam either. For an excellent account of the Agrégation exam and its role in shaping French philosophy, see Alan D. Schrift, “The Effects of the Agrégation de Philosophie on Twentieth Century French Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46, no. 3 (July 2008): 449–72. There is no better account of the impact of France’s academic institutions, many of which have no exact counterpart in either the American, British, or German systems of education, than Schrift’s Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006). 4. Merleau-Ponty was 53 at the time of his death, thus two years Levinas’s junior. Paul Ricoeur, who attended the defense, was seven years younger than 272 Notes to Pages 1–3 Levinas and Blin more than ten years younger. Blin was responsible for publishing Levinas’s early work Existence and Existents in the years immediately after the war. 5. Malka, Emmanuel Levinas, 153. 6. Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 218. 7. Xavier Tilliette, in attendance at the lectures that would become Time and the Other (1947), said of Levinas at that time, “No one would have thought that he would write such important books and that he would become one of the glories of French philosophy.” Levinas’s speaking style was apparently rather dry, his voice “small,” and his presentation style “brittle.” The evident originality and brilliance of the analyses pursued in Totality and Infinity were thus all the more striking for those who knew Levinas only as a quiet figure on the margins of the Parisian intellectual scene. See Malka, Emmanuel Levinas, 152–53. 8. Levinas remained the director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO) throughout his university career, though he delegated more and more of the administrative tasks to others. 9. See Adriaan Peperzak’s review of Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy, Contintal Philosophy Review 40, no. 3 (2007): 349–52. Peperzak helpfully corrects a number of errors in Malka’s account. See Roger Burggraeve’s Emmanuel Levinas: Une bibliographie primaire et secondaire (1925– 1985) (Leuven: Peeters Verlag, 1986). Burggraeve’s bibliography lists some 39 theses (10 for the doctorate, the remainder for the licence degree) devoted to Levinas’s thought between 1963 and 1976. Almost all of these were generated by students at either the Katholieke Universiteit or at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-neuve). 10. When Totality and Infinity was published, phenomenologically-oriented French philosophy was dominated by the influence of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Levinas’s religious commitments and his relative distance from Marxist political thought (a result, perhaps, of having lived through the Russian revolution and its aftermath) meant...