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The Levinas Reader Emmanuel Levinas EDITED BY SEAN HAND Basil Blackwell Copyright © Introduction and editorial apparatus, Sean Hand 1989 Copyright © 'The Phenomenological Theory of Being', 'There Is', 'Time and the Other', 'Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge', 'Ethics as First Philosophy', 'Substitution', 'Reality and Its Shadow', 'The Transcendence of Words', 'The Servant and her Master', 'The Other in Proust', 'God and Philosophy', 'Revelation in the Jewish Tradition', 'The Pact', 'Ideology and Idealism', 'Judaism', 'Judaism and the Pre­ sent', 'The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel', 'Means of Identification', 'The State of Caesar and the State of David', 'Politics After', 'Assimilation and New Culture', 'Ethics and Politics', Emmanuel Levinas, 1930, 1946, 1947, 1963, 1984, 1968, 1948, 1949, 1966, 1947, 1975, 1977, 1982, 1973, 1971, 1960, 1951, 1963, 1971, 1979, 1980, 1982 First published 1989 Basil Blackwell Ltd 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 lJF, UK Basil Blackwell Inc. 3 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA All rights reserved . Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanic­ al, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and witout a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Dala A CIP catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library Library of Congress Calaloging in Publication Data Levinas, Emmanuel. [Selections. English. 1989] The Levinas reader/edited by Sean Hand. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-631-16446-4. - ISBN 0-631-16447-2 (pbk.) 1. Ontology. 2. Ethics. 3. Aesthetics. 4. Religion. 5. Political science. I. Hand, Sean. H. Title. B2430.L482E6 1989 89-14865 194--dc20 CIP Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Plantin by Graphicraft Typesetters, Ltd Printed in Great Britain by Camelot Press PLC, Southampton Contents Preface v Acknowledgements vu Introduction 1 I From Existence to Ethics 9 1 The Phenomenological Theory of Being 11 2 There is: Existence without Existents 29 3 Time and the Other 37 4 Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge 59 5 Ethics as First Philosophy 75 6 Substitution 88 11 Reading, Writing, Revolution, or Aesthetics, Religion, Politics 127 Aesthetics 7 Reality and Its Shadow 129 8 The Transcendence of Words 144 9 The Servant and her Master� 150 10 The other in Proust 160 Religion 11 God and Philosophy 166 12 Revelation in the Jewish Tradition 190 13 The Pact 211 14 Prayer Without Demand 227 Politics 15 Ideology and Idealism 235 16 Difficult Freedom 249 17 Zionisms 267 iv Contents 18 Ethics and Politics 289 Glossary 298 Bibliography 301 Index 308 Preface Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most profound, exacting and original philosophers of twentieth-century Europe. His post-rational ethics stands as the ultimate and exemplary challenge to the solitude of Being, a rigorous and moving testimony of one's infinite obligation to the other person. Levinas's teaching reveals ethics to be the first philosophy: his call to responsibility henceforth obliges thought to refer not to the truebut to the good. In assuming this colossal responsibility, Levinas has changed the course of contemporary philosophy. The Levinas Reader is the most comprehensive introduction to Levinas's work yet published in English. The essays chosen encompass every aspect of his thought: the early phenomenological studies written under the gui­ dance and inspiration of Husserl and Heidegger; the fully developed ethical critique of such totalizing philosophies; the piolleering essays on the moral dimension to aesthetics; the rich and subtle readings of the Talmud which are an exemplary model of an et4ical, transcendental philosophy at work; the admirable meditations on current political issues. Given the extra­ ordinary range of these texts, their specialized vocabulary and assumed knowledge, each essay has been prefaced by a brief introduction presenting the basic issues and the necessary background, and suggesting ways to study the text further. The general introduction to the edition presents a clear resume of the circumstances surrounding Levinas's thought and each stage of its development, in the hope that the beginner as well as the specialist will be able to benefit from Levinas's inspiring teaching. A full bibliography has also been provided. The Levinas Reader has both used the best of several extant English­ language versions of his work, and commissioned translations especially for this volume. Given the very nature of Levinas's thought, involving an infinite responsibility for the other and an equally infinite interpretability of those texts which are the bedrock of our culture, the attempt to homogenize these translations to an excessive degree would directly contravene the very spirit of his philosophy. The notion of a true translation is precisely the VI Preface impossible goal of Levinas's ethical enterprise. Editorial intervention has therefore been undertaken primarily to help the reader: minor stylistic changes have been made, and a glossary explaining the main Judaic refer­ ences has been provided at the end of the volume. Certain conventions concerning the translation of the term 'other' have been observed: autrui, autre, and Autre have been rendered as 'Other', 'other' and 'Other (l'Autre), respectively. In general, quotations from the Bible have been taken from the Collins Revised Standard Version, and quotations from the Talmud come from The Babylonian Talmud, under the editorship of Isidore Epstein (London: Soncino Press), 1948. I should like to thank my editor at Basil Blackwell, Stephan Chambers, my desk editor, Andrew McNeillie, and my copy editor, Alex McIntosh, for the commitment and complete professionalism which all of them brought to the production of this volume. The Bodleian Library, the Taylor Institution recondite material. Sarah Richmond produced superb translations of diffi­ cult works with impressive efficiency. Michael Holland brought his expert knowledge of Blanchot to bear on his translation. Roland Lack, Jonathan Romney and Michael Temple worked hard to produce their new trans­ lations. Daniel Frank of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Stu­ dies generously helped me to read specific passages of the Talmud. Above all, I should like to thank Emmanuel Levinas for his kind support, and for the continuously inspiring nature of his work, based on responsibility for the other. Any errors which remain in this work must be my own respon­ sibility. Sean Hand Acknowledgements The editor and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to include the material collected in this edition: for 'The Phenomenological Theory of Being', Northwestern University Press; for 'There is', 'Substitu­ tion', 'Reality and its Shadow' and 'God and Philosophy', Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (division of Kluwer academic publishers); for 'Time and the Other', Duquesne University Press; for 'Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge', Open Court Publishing Company; for 'Ethics as First Philo­ sophy', Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles; for 'The Transcendence of Words', 'The Servant and her Master' and 'The other in Proust', Editions Fata Morgana; fore 'Revelation in the Jewish Tradition', 'The Pact', 'The State of Caesar and the State of David', 'Politics After!' and 'Assimilation and New Culture', Editions de Minuit; for 'Prayer Without Demand', Presses Universitaires de France; for 'Ideology and Idealism', Ohio State University Press; for 'Judaism', 'Judaism and the Present', 'The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel' and 'Means of Identification', Johns Hopkins University Press; for 'Ethics and Politics', the editor, Les nouveaux cahiers. Introduction 'We are all responsible for everyone else - but I am more responsible than all the others.' This remark, spoken by Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, is one Levinas is fond of quoting. It is a neat indication of the nature of a thought that, in the words of Jacques Derrida, 'caD make us tremble'. 1 Its challenge is an excessive one: a mode of being and saying where I am endlessly obligated to the Other, a multiplicity in being which refuses totalization and takes form instead as fraternity and discourse, an ethical relation which forever precedes and exceeds the egoism and tyranny of ontology. It is not surprising that the remark is taken from Dostoyevsky. Emma­ nuel Levinas was born in Lithuania in 1906 of Jewish parents. His earliest memories include the news of the death of Tolstoy, and the tricentennial celebrations of the house of Romanov. The First World War, which up­ rooted the family, and the 1917 revolution, merge in his memories with his father's bookshop in Kovno. A particular confluence of the old and the new was therefore much in evidence. Judaism had been developed to a high spiritual point in Lithuania, and in the eighteenth century had produced arguably the last Talmudist of genius, the Gaon of Vilna. At the same time, Levmas's parents belonged to a generation that saw their futur� in the Russian language and culture. Levinas's earliest reading therefore involved not only the Hebrew Bible, but the great Russians: Pushkin, Gogol, Dos­ toyevsky and Tolstoy. It was the preoccupations of these Russian writers that led Levinas in 1923 to Strasbourg (the closest French city to Lithuania) in order to study philosophy under such teachers as Charles Blondel and Maurice Pradines. At this time the writings of Bergson were making a strong impact among the students, and Levinas has always insisted on the importance of Bergson's theory of duration.
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