Emmanuel Lévinas

Meaning and Sense

The reality given to receptivity and the meaning it can take on seem distinguishable. For it seems as though experience first gave contents — forms, solidity, roughness, color, sound, savor, odor, heat, heaviness, etc. — and then all these contents were animated with meta-phors, receiving an overloading through which they are borne beyond the given.1

Reality and Its Shadow

It is generally, dogmatically, admitted that the function of art is expression, and that artistic expression rests on cognition. An artist — even a painter, even a musician — tells. He tells of the ineffable. An artwork prolongs, and goes beyond, common perception. What common perception trivializes and misses, an artwork apprehends in its irreducible essence. It thus coincides with metaphysical intuition. Where common language abdicates, a poem or a painting speaks. Thus an artwork is more real than reality and attests to the dignity of the artistic imagination, which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute. Though it be disparaged as an aesthetic canon, realism nevertheless retains all its prestige. In fact it is repudiated only in the name of a higher realism. Surrealism is a superlative.

Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity

Every philosophy seeks truth. Sciences too can be defined by this search, for from the philosophic eros, alive or dormant in them, they derive their noble passion. If this definition seems too general and rather empty, it will, however, permit us to distinguish two directions the philosophical spirit takes, and this will clarify its physiognomy. These directions interact in the idea of truth.

Language and Proximity

Events which are staggered out according to time and reach consciousness in a series of acts and states also ordered according to time acquire, across this mulitiplicity, a unity of meaning in narration. Signs which signify by their place in a system and by their divergency from other signs (and the words of historically constituted languages do present this formal aspect) are able to confer an identity of meaning to the temporal dispersion of events and thoughts, to synchronize them in the undephasable simultaneity of a story.

As If Consenting to Horror

I learned very early, perhaps even before 1933 and certainly after Hitlers huge success at the time of his election to the Reichstag, of Heideggers sympathy toward National Socialism. It was the late Alexandre Koyr6 who mentioned it to me for the first time on his return from a trip to Germany. I could not doubt the news, but took it with stupor and disappointment, and also with the faint hope that it expressed only the temporary lapse of a great speculative mind into practical banality. It cast a shadow over my firm confidence that an unbridgeable distance forever separated the delirious and criminal hatred voiced by Evil on the pages of Mein Kampf from the intellectual vigor and extreme analytical virtuosity displayed in Sein und Zeit, which had opened the field to a new type of philosophical inquiry. Could one question the incomparable impression produced by this book, in which it immediately became apparent that Heidegger was the interlocutor and equal of the greatest-those very few-founders of European philosophy? that here was someone, this seemed obvious, all modern thought would soon have to answer? This is a greatness whose dimensions it is not easy to measure. It lies in the extension of the work of Husserl, to whom Sein und Zeit was dedicated in all sincerity in the twenties. The Heideggerian opus presupposes Husserlian phenomenology but transfigures it. Here traditional notions of rationality are modified, while Heideggers stylistic genius makes the unsaid of the highest discourses of our culture resonate. Thought had always been understood in terms of knowledge arriving at what is,

Sociality and Money

This is a translation of ‘Socialite et argent’, a text by Emmanuel Levinas originally published in 1987. Levinas describes the emergence of money out of interhuman relations of exchange and the social relations – sociality – that result. While elsewhere he has presented sociality as ‘nonindifference to alterity’ it appears here as ‘proximity of the stranger’ and points to the tension between an economic system based on money and the basic human disposition to respond to the face of the other person. Money both encodes and effaces sociality, both designates and disguises social relations. It arises from the way that needs and interests are manifested in exchange relations, in what he calls the ‘interestedness’ of economic life. But interests are always already cut through by the fact that being is always ‘being with others’. Being is always ‘interbeing’. Interestedness is always confronted by disinterestedness, that is, by a sociality marked by the ‘goodness of giving’, attachment to and concern for the poverty of the other person. Levinas concludes with a discussion of sociality and justice, posing questions about the tension between the demand to respond to an Other immediately before me and at the same time to respond to the demands of an other Other (the third person) who also invites a response.

The Ego and the Totality

A particular being can take itself to be a totality only if it is thoughtless. Not that it is deceiving itself or thinking badly or foolishly; it is not thinking. We do of course see the freedom or violence of individuals. For us thinking beings, who have knowledge of the totality and situate every particular being relative to it, and seek a meaning for the spontaneity of violence, this freedom seems to give evidence of individuals who confuse their particularity with the totality. This confusion in individuals is not thought, but life. A being that has life in the totality exists as a totality, lives as though it occupied the center of being and were its source, as though it drew everything from the here and now, in which it was nonetheless put or created. For it the forces that traverse it are already forces assumed; it experiences them as already integrated into its needs and its enjoyment. What a thinking being perceives as exteriority that calls for work and appropriation, a living being as such experiences as its substance, consubstantial with it, essentially immediate, an element and a vital medium. This — in the philosophical sense of the term — cynical 1 behavior of a living being we find also in man — through abstraction, to be sure, since thought has already transfigured life in concrete man. It figures as the relation one has with nourishment, in the very general sense that every enjoyment enjoys something, a “something” whose independence has been taken away. The being that is assumed by a living being, the assimilable — are nutriments.2

Transcendence and Evil

The attempt to throw doubt on the very meaning of words such as “transcendence” and “beyond” attests to their semantic consistency, since, at least in this critical discourse which concerns them, one recognizes what one is contesting. The reduction of the absolute meaning of these terms to a relative transcendence and a relative beyond, then taken, by the force of some impulse, to the furthest extent and highest degree, already brings transcendence and the beyond into this superlative, or ascribes a transcending power to certain of our psychological forces. And yet is there not lacking something in the intelligibility of these notions, for them to be veritably conceived? In our philosophical tradition veritable thought is true thought, a knowing, a thought referred to being — to being designating an entity, but also to being understood as a verb, expressing the fulfillment by entities of that task or destiny of being, without which we could not recognize an entity as an entity.

Truth and Justice

Metaphysics or transcendence is recognized in the work of the intellect that aspires after exteriority, that is Desire. But the Desire for exteriority has appeared to us to move not in objective cognition but in Discourse, which in turn has presented itself as justice, in the uprightness of the welcome made to the face. Is not the vocation to truth to which traditionally the intellect answers belied by this analysis? What is the relation between justice and truth?

Freedom and Command

To command is to act on a will. Among all the forms of doing, to act on a will is to truly act. It is to act on an independent reality, on what does not only offer great resistance, but absolute resistance, resistance of a different order from great resistance. It is not he who labors, that is, moves matter, that we call a man of action, not he who makes war, but he who orders others to labor and to war.