Emmanuel Levinas

I was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1906 (naturalized French in 1930.) In 1923, I began to study philosophy at Strasbourg University, where I came into contact with Charles Blondel, Maurice Halbwachs, Maurice Pradines and Henri Carteron. It was also during these student years that I met and began my lifelong friendship with Maurice Blanchot.In 1928, I went to Freiburg University to pursue studies in phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. As I have stated elsewhere, I went to Frieburg for Husserl and discovered Heidegger. I gave a presentation in Husserl's last seminar and attended Heidegger's first (with others such as Cavailles, Fink, and Carnap). My debt to both masters is evident in my first major publications: The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1930) and En Découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (1949). (Though in 1935, I published *On Evasion*, my first attempt to break with Heidegger.)During the second World War, my extended family was murdered by the Nazis. While I spent most of the war in a hard-labor camp for French officers, Blanchot hid my immediate family. It was during my internment that I sketched the phenomenological inquiries eventually published as Existence and Existents (1947). After the war, I won early 'acclaim' as one of the foremost exponents of the work of Husserl, and was read by Jean-Paul Sartre among others.This 'acclaim' is another way of saying that I was regarded as a Husserl specialist: as Merleau-Ponty noted, Sartre was introduced to Hussurl and phenomenology through my early work. During these times I frequented the avant-guard philosophical circles of Gabriel Marcel and my good friend Jean Wahl. I also attended a few of Kojève's Hegel lectures (with others such as Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, R. P. Fessard, Raymond Queneau, Jean Desanti, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Eric Weil.)It was mainly during the fifties that I began to work out a highly original philosophy of ethics with the aim of going beyond the ethically neutral tradition of ontology. My first 'magnum opus,' as some have called it, Totality and Infinity (1961), influenced in part by the dialogical philosophies of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, sought to accomplish this departure through an analysis of the "face-to-face" relation with the Other. At the center of the work is the claim that the Other is not knowable, but calls into question and challenges the complacency of the self through Desire, language, and the concern for justice. This claim and others were further elaborated in my second 'magnum opus,' Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), where I seek to push philosophical intelligibility to the limit in an effort to lessen the inevitable concessions made to ontology and the tradition. It is this work that is generally considered to be my most important contribution to the contemporary debate surrounding the closure of metaphysical discourse, much commented upon by that young up-start (meant affectionately of course), Jacques Derrida.Alongside my strictly philosophical corpus, I've also written considerbly on Judaism, my 'confessional' writings, as it were: especially my Talmudic commentaries (Quatre lectures Talmudiques (1968), Du sacré au saint (1977), L’au-delà du verset (1982). While these exhibit a clear confluence with my remarks on ethics, I never try to reconcile them explicitly. MySpace designed by Pure Layouts