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Levinas' Prophetic Ethics: His Use of the Sources of Judaism

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Levinas' Prophetic Ethics: His Use of the Sources of Judaism LEVINAS' PROPHETIC EfHICS LEVINAS' PROPHETIC ETHICS: HIS USE OF THE SOURCES OF JUDAISM By OONA AJZENSTAT, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Mc Master University Copyright by Oona Ajzenstat, January 1999 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ( 1999) McMaster University (Religious Studies) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Levinas' Prophetic Ethics: His Use of the Sources of Judaism AUTHOR: Oona Ajzenstat, B.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor P. Travis Kroeker NUMBER OF PAGES: vii, 329 11 Abstract This thesis contributes to the discussion of two questions central to the scholarly study of the work of Emmanuel Levinas: the question of the nature of his hermeneutics, and the question of the nature of the relationship between his philosophy and his religion. The thesis consists of an extended examination of how and why Levinas reads certain of the sources of Judaism. I watch him utilizing images, ideas and quotations from the Bible, Kabbalah and Talmud in support of his larger philosophical project, a project which consists mainly of a polemic against modem ontology -- philosophical and political -- and against the hermeneutic of reification which supports that ontology. The Bible, Kabbalah and Talmud become, in Levinas' reading, weapons in a battle against Hegelianism, Nazi totalitarianism, and modem progressivist liberalism; or, more precisely, they come to represent ways of turning away from the battles these structures inscribe towards a prophetic peace. m Acknowledgments Among the many people I owe thanks I would like publicly to single out a very few. P. Travis Kroeker, my supervisor, and Robert Gibbs, of the University of Toronto, bear together the responsibility for introducing me to Levinas. Both read several drafts of the thesis and offered excellent critique, and the liberality of each stands as a model for me. Others helped invaluably by talking to me philosophically about everything except Levinas: foremost among these are Sam and Janet Ajzenstat and Zdravko Planinc. IV Table of Contents Descriptive Note . .!! Abstract . III Acknowledgments . iv Table of Contents . ...... v Key to Abbreviations .............................................. vi Introduction . 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE STRUCTURE OF LEVINAS' THOUGHT ............. 21 I. The basic structure: same and other . 23 II. The problems of temporal order .................................... 34 III. Ethics and politics ............................................. 51 IV. Ethics and Judaism . 68 a. Philosophy and theology: their (non-) relation to prophecy .............. 72 b. Reason and revelation . 76 c. Hebrew and Greek . 79 CHAPTER TWO: LEVINAS' BIBLE/ LEVINAS PROPHECY . 87 I. Levinas' saying/ Levinas' said. 88 II. Levinas' midrash . 110 a. Levinas on theology . 110 b. The beginning of the midrash . 117 c. Levinas on prophecy ...................................... 124 d. The rest of the midrash . 131 CHAPTER THREE: LEVINAS' KABBALAH/ LEVINAS' TIKKUN . 141 I. Levinas and Abulafia ........................................... 152 a. Deconstruction and knots . 153 b. Prophecy, witness and glory: union on the horizontal ................ 163 c. Mystical union . 169 II. Levinas and Luria ............................................. 172 CHAPTER FOUR: LEVINAS' TALMUD/ LEVINAS HISTORY ............. 201 I. Between Two Worlds .......................................... 218 a. The problem ........................................... 218 b. Religion and love ........................................ 228 c. Standing outside of history . 235 II. Messianic Texts . 244 CHAPTER FIVE: NIGHT SPACE . 273 I. Nights .................................................... 274 a. Four stories . 274 b. Useless Suffering . 284 II. The space of his ethics ......................................... 302 Bibliography ................................................. 325 v Bibliography of Works by Levinas and a Key to Abbreviations BTV Beyond the Verse. Trans. Gary D. Mole. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. CPP CollectedPhilosophicalPapers. Trans. A. Lingis. Phaenomenologica 100, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. De /'evasion. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982. DEHH En decouvrant l 'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: J. V rin, 1949. DF Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. S. Hand. London: The Athalone Press, 1990. EI Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982. ffiM see footnote 181. EE Existence and Existents. Trans. A Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. EN Entre Nous. Trans. M.B. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. GCM OfGod Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998. LR The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. NTR Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. A. Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. ITN In the Time ofNations. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1994. OB Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. PL The Provocation oflevinas: Rethinking the Other. Eds. R. Bernasconi and D. Wood. New York: Routledge, 1988. PN Proper Names. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. RPH "Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism." Critical Inquiry 17 ( 1990): 63-71. Vl RK with Richard Kearney. "Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas." Face to Face with Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. R. A. Cohen. New York: SUNY Press, 1986. 13­ 34. RM with Raoul Mortley. "Levinas." French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Scheieder, Seres, Irigaray, Le Doe.ff, Derrida. London: Routledge, 1991. 10-23. TO Time and the Other. Trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. TI Totality and Infinity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. TrO "The Trace of the Other." Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 345-359. WO "Wholly Otherwise.'' Rereading Levinas. Ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, 3-10. vii Introduction Emmanuel Levinas was born on January 12 19061 in Lithuania, a country where, as he explains, ''Jewish culture was intellectually prized and fostered and where the interpretation of biblical texts was cultivated to a high degree" (RK 17). At home and in his secular schools he spoke Russian and read the great Russian novelists, but in addition he began at an early age to study Hebrew and to read the texts of the Jewish tradition~ indeed, he describes his childhood as an immersion in the way of life of the Lithuanian Jew, a way which rested ··in a tremendous curiosity for books."'2 In 1915, when Levinas was eleven, the Jews of Lithuania were expelled by government decree and his family moved to the Ukraine. Here, despite the antisemitic pogroms which occurred during the general upheaval caused by the revolution, he was able to attend high school. By 1920, the revolutionary government had revoked the decree of expulsion and Levinas' family returned to Lithuania where he finished his early schooling. He left in 1923 for France, where he enrolled at the University of Strasbourg and studied under a number of professors, among them Charles BlondeI. With Blonde! he read Henri Bergson, who was probably his earliest philosophical influence: Levinas was impressed by Bergson's theory of time and his reflections on technology. In the mid 1920s he became interested in Husserl and went to Freiburg to study with him for the academic lThe confusion about his birthdate eYident m his various obituaries results from the fact that Lithuarua was at the time of his birth using the Julian calendar. His birthdate was therefore recorded as 30 December, 1905. '.?.Emmanuel LeYinas, Emmanuel Levinas: Qui etes-vous? interYiew by Fran~ois Poirie (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 67; translated and quoted m Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Roseu:weig and Leviuas (Chicago: Uni,·crs1ty of Chicago Press, 1994), 116. I haYc drawn mainly on Cohen's biographical chapter for this short biographical sketch; Cohen, Elevations, 115-13'.?.. 2 year of 1928-29. There he also studied with Heidegger who had published Being and Time in 1927 and had thereby become "the leading light in German philosophy" (RK 14). He returned to France in 1930, this time to Paris, and completed his dissertation, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, under the tutelage of Jean Wahl. It was this book, together with a number of Levinas' early articles and his 1931 translation (with Gabrielle Pfeiffer) of Husserl's CartesianMediations, which, it is generally agreed, introduced phenomenology to France. Beginning in 1930, Levinas taught at the Alliance Israelite Universelle, an organization which had as its goal the spread of Jewish education in the countries of the Mediterranean. He married Rachel Levy, a friend from his childhood in Lithuania, and eventually had a daughter, Simonne (b. 1936) and a son, Michael (b. 1948). During the 1930s he occasionally attended lectures at the Sorbonne, those of Brunschvicg regularly and those of Kojeve irregularly. He also attended Gabriel Marcel's soirees. He began, in the early thirties, to write a book on Heidegger but abandoned it when Heidegger announced his support for the Nazi party, producing instead a short article called "Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism'' in which
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