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

An anecdote: in the middle of a heated conversation among the dozen or so scholars present at the annual meeting of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy in 1994 (I can no longer remember the topic), a prominent scholar poked his finger repeatedly at the copy of Emmanuel Levinas's Beyond The Verse in front of him and excitedly declaimed, "This is my Torah!" At that moment, a voice that was already somewhat marginal at the table became even more so.

Another anecdote: in the discussion of Jean Wahl's Petite histoire de "l'existentialisme," published in French in 1947, Levinas recounted a theory of the various stages of the spread of new ideas that he credited to Husserl: "During the first stage, one cries: it's absurd! During the second stage, one says indignantly: but everybody knows that! There is a third stage, in which the doctrine is reinstated in its true originality."

Moyn's intellectual history of the development of the category of alterity in Levinas's thought, from his first writings through the publication of Totality and Infinity in 1961, seeks to displace the kinds of uses of Levinas represented by the first anecdote above. Moyn sees the contemporary appropriation of Levinas as "a kind of ersatz religion in contemporary intellectual life" (13) that can only end up forestalling "criticism and therefore innovation" (6). And so in the interest of restaging the possibility for innovation, Moyn shows that Levinas is not some ur-Jew, wholly outside modernity or philosophy. His childhood life—his parents were Russified bourgeois Jews—shows that he was a Jew primarily "in a sociological sense" (25). His role as a teacher for the École Normale Israélite Orientale beginning in 1930 (he became its director in the early 1950s) placed him in an environment that was anything but a "bastion of traditions in which Levinas could ride out the approaching storms of history" (92). Most importantly, Moyn detaches Levinas from the work of the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig by showing that Levinas's theory of ethical intersubjectivity between persons is nowhere to be found in Rosenzweig's work.

To this, I say indignantly: but everybody knows that!

Books, articles, and conference papers that aim at detaching Levinas from Rosenzweig have been appearing for at least a decade. (See the work of P. Gordon, D. Novak, R. Rashkover, myself, and others.) In addition, given Levinas's frequent protestations, especially in his earliest Talmudic readings, of his lack of expertise with traditional Jewish texts, the fact that Levinas had to construct or even invent for himself a coherent tradition that lays behind his understanding of Judaism is hardly surprising. Indeed, it would only be shocking if Levinas's early life were evidence that he was a Jew in something other than a sociological sense or if his environs in the 1930s were not primarily secular ones.

Luckily, Origins of the Other also serves as an immensely useful (even if necessarily partial) history of Continental philosophy in France from Bergson's earliest work in 1889 through 1961. Moyn painstakingly, yet in extremely fluid prose, sifts through Levinas's influences great and small. The cast of characters here includes not only Rosenzweig, Husserl, and Heidegger but also Rudolf Otto, Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt, Lev Shestov, Karl Barth, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean Wahl, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. This breadth makes Origins of the Other one of the richest portraits of Levinas currently available in English, and it will be essential not only for scholars in philosophy of religion and Jewish studies but also for scholars interested in how the history of the study of religion has been impacted by phenomenology and existentialism. Furthermore, Moyn's book is the best of the recent books on twentieth-century Jewish intellectual history, superior both to Gordon's Rosenzweig and Heidegger and David Myers's Resisting History.

In the first half of the book, Moyn details the preference for Heidegger over Husserl...