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The Discursive Hermeneutics of Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2003 Translating "Hebrew" into "Greek": the discursive hermeneutics of Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic readings Matthew aW yne Guy Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Guy, Matthew Wayne, "Translating "Hebrew" into "Greek": the discursive hermeneutics of Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic readings" (2003). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2465. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2465 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. TRANSLATING “HEBREW” INTO “GREEK”: THE DISCURSIVE HERMENEUTICS OF EMMANUEL LEVINAS’S TALMUDIC READINGS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Interdepartmental Program in Comparative Literature by Matthew Wayne Guy B.S., University of Miami M.A., Clemson University December 2003 Many people have contributed to my accomplishments, but the one who deserves special mention most of all is my wife, Kristina, whose encouragement, faith, and support keep me going. ii Table of Contents DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................ii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................v CHAPTER ONE. INTRODUCTION: ENTERING THE TEXT ................................................1 Discourse in Levinas: The Reading of Structures ...............................................................1 Levinas, “Greek,” and the Talmud: The Structure of Reading ............................................7 Brief Abstract of Levinas’s Philosophical Project ...........................................................21 CHAPTER TWO. SUBJECTIVITY AND THE SINS OF READING .....................................30 “Who is One-Self?”.........................................................................................................30 Phenomenology as Radical Philosophy ...........................................................................32 Phenomenology as Radical Method ................................................................................36 Intentionality and the Significance of Being ....................................................................38 Dasein and the Structure of Being ..................................................................................43 Heidegger and the Power of Being .................................................................................50 CHAPTER THREE. READING: THE POSSIBILITY OF THE OTHER ................................61 Phenomenology and the Possibility of the Other .............................................................61 Ethics and the Structures of Transcendence ....................................................................66 Being-for-the-Other .......................................................................................................69 Salvation, Sorcery, and the Western Subject ...................................................................74 Temptation and Opposition ............................................................................................82 CHAPTER FOUR. INFINITY: BEYOND BEING, BEYOND THE TEXT .............................88 The Challenge of an Ontological Reversal ......................................................................88 Descartes and the Infinite ...............................................................................................90 Infinity and the Surplus of Meaning ................................................................................94 The Oedipal Blindness of Philosophy ............................................................................101 Reading the Infinite in the Talmud: The Form of Transcendence ....................................106 Reading God in the Talmud: The Content of Transcendence ..........................................121 CHAPTER FIVE. ETHICS AND READING: BEFORE BEING, BEFORE THE TEXT .......131 The Risk of Subjectivity ...............................................................................................131 A Tradition of Renewal and Anti-Idolatry ....................................................................134 The Subject of the Book ..............................................................................................140 Ethics and Revelation: The Responsible Reader .............................................................142 Separation and Transcendence: The Redemption of Language .......................................147 Reason and Vigilance: Reading Ethics as “For-the-Other”.............................................150 iii CHAPTER SIX. CONCLUSION: HOLY HISTORY AND MESSIANIC POLITICS ............158 “To the Extent that Messianic Times Are Often Designated as the Epoch of Conclusions”..158 The Temptation of Revolution: The Future of the State .................................................159 Messianic Discourse and Holy History .........................................................................162 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................165 VITA ......................................................................................................................................176 iv Abstract This dissertation examines Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic readings and the hermeneutics employed to translate the Talmud into modern language. Levinas claims to be translating “Hebrew” into “Greek” by rendering into a universal, philosophical language (“Greek”) the ethical structure of subjectivity (“Hebrew”) within the Talmud. Since they investigate the structure of subject ivity, extensive use of his philosophical works and the influential works of others are used to analyze his Talmudic readings. Chapter One places Levinas’s project against the background of the Talmud, Judaic tradition, and projects like Rudolf Bultmann’s New Testament readings and Thorleif Boman’s comparative study of Greek and Hebrew. A brief abstract of Levinas’s philosophy emphasizing his understanding of the hermeneutics of subjectivity is given. Chapters Two and Three examine Husserl and Heidegger’s formative influences, especially their hermeneutics of everyday experience, wherein Levinas locates the essential flaw of Western philosophy, which begins with an already constituted subject ivity. Although all three view the structure of hermeneutics as essentially discursive, Levinas insists that the subject is not the source for these discursive structures, or even for its own subject ivity. Rather, that source, where any philosophical understanding must start, is the Other. Levinas sees exhortations against things like “sorcery” and “temptation” as the Talmud’s mode of resisting and restraining subjectivity’s natural tendency to seek out its own freedom and power. Western philosophy, however, actually tends to either start from this condition or work toward it. Chapter Four discusses t he idea of infinity according to Levinas and Descartes, and it s role in founding consciousness. In this respect, infinity coincides with the idea of God . Chapter five looks at ethics and its relation to the structure of subjectivity. Levinas reads the Talmud in light of the v ethical situation confronting the subject in the encounter with the Other. The Ot her actually establishes subjectivity and its discursive hermeneutical structures, so subjectivity begins and continues as an ethical response. The Conclusion looks at the idea of “messianic politics,” showing how Levinas describes the structure of subjectivity as a unique “chosenness,” revealing its discursive hermeneutical structures to be orientating the subject to future ethical responses. vi Chapter One Introduction: Entering the Text Discourse in Levinas: The Reading of Structure The work of Emmanuel Levinas is a work of internalized struggles. From the beginning, he is a phenomenologist operating ceaselessly to overcome the limits of that philosophical science. And, in surmounting the ontologies of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas’s thought still bears the traces of their influence. Furthermore, he is at all times a Jewish thinker indebted to Martin Heidegger yet repulsed by his Nazi affiliations. He is also a Western philosopher who comes to dispute the traditional stance and met hodology of Western philosophy. As Jacques Derrida points out in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” Levinas’s works attempt to overcome the violence of metaphysics, but cannot escape the language of metaphysics to achieve this task. It must speak “Greek,” a metonym for the West, to overcome the violence done by its own “Greek,” or philosophical, language, and it is therefore a logomachy that can “only do itself violence” (“Violence” 130). Many see Levinas’s Otherwise than Being as a response to Derrida’s critique, and within that work a turn to more
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