Abstract
Not unlike handsome cities razed to rubble by war, our contemporary intellectual traditions undergo repeated attack and burial. Schools of thought spread their influence to a variety of fields and then are dismissed as outmoded; prophets are uncovered then deposed; even particularly charged words — once on everyone’s lips and in book-title after book-title — are condemned to a long afterlife as journalistic clichés. In the context of this seemingly unflagging embrace of abandonment and change, consider the name, the work, the face of Emmanuel Levinas. As I write, and possibly still as you read, Levinas is a kind of prophet. Through his interrogation of the Western philosophical tradition he has become the source of one of the key paradigm shifts of postmodern culture: a return to ethics, a remaking of our tradition in the direction of the other. In his words, the ‘being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might …. However, with the appearance of the human — and this is my entire philosophy — there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other.’1
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Notes
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, trans. T. Wright, in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (London: Routledge, 1988) 169–80; 172.
Jean-Luc Godard, Made in USA (London: Lorrimer, 1967) 39–40.
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite’, Interview with Richard Kearney, in Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester University Press, 1984) 47–70; 52.
Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1983) 34.
Jean-Paul Sartre and B. Lévy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews (1991), trans. A. van den Hoven (University of Chicago Press, 1996) 69–71, 87.
Susan Handelman, ‘Facing the Other: Levinas, Perelman, Rosenzweig’, Religion & Literature, 22, 2–3 (1990) 61–84; 64.
Jill Robbins, ‘An Inscribed Responsibility: Levinas’s Difficult Freedom’, review of Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism by Emmanuel Levinas, Modern Language Notes 106 (1991) 1052–62; 1052.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1978) 79–153; 312 n.
Denis Donoghue, ‘The Philosopher of Selfless Love’, New York Review of Books, 21 March 1996, 37–40; 37.
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Signature’, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand (London: Athlone, 1990) 291–5; 291.
Zvi Kolitz, ‘Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God: A Story Written Especially for Di Yiddishe Tsaytung’, trans. J. V. Mallow et al., Cross Currents 44 (1994) 362–77; 370.
Zvi Kolitz, ‘Yosl Rokover redt tsu got’, Di Goldene Keyt, 18 (1954) 102–10; 102.
Jack Kugelmass, ed. and trans., From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York: Schocken, 1983) 14.
Ibid., 10.
Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970; New York: Penguin, 1977) 140.
Ibid., 191.
Philip Roth, ‘“I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”; or, Looking at Kafka’, in Reading Myself and Others (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux). 247–70; 247–8.
Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 7.
Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 54, 56.
Ibid., 58.
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979) 16, 24.
Emmanuel Levinas, interview with R. Mortley, in French Philosophers in Conversation (London: Routledge, 1991) 11–23; 15–16.
Jill Robbins, ‘Aesthetic Totality and Ethical Infinity: Levinas on Art’, L’esprit créateur, 35, 3 (1995) 66–79; 66–7.
Ibid., 71.
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La réalité et son ombre’, Les temps modernes 38 (1948) 771–89; qtd. in Robbins, ‘Aesthetic Totality’, 12.
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Poetry and Resurrection: Notes on Agnon’, in Proper Names, trans. M. B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996) 7–16; 9.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 14, 8.
Ibid., 14–15.
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Ravvin, N. (1999). Have You Reread Levinas Lately? Transformations of the Face in Post-Holocaust Fiction. In: Hadfield, A., Rainsford, D., Woods, T. (eds) The Ethics in Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27361-4_4
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