Neither according to Hegel nor according to Levinas is it possible to define the person independently of collectivity. For both, dialogues play a strategic role in the orientation towards the collective. For Hegel, the “good conscience” is significant because it is a reference for describing the assumptions, and the results of a dialogue. I describe these implications in my first section. In the second section, I present Levinas’s objections to the “good conscience.” Instead of a “good conscience,” for Levinas, conscience is an instance that does not confirm the subject but accuses it. In the third section, I explore Levinas’s understanding of dialogue. In his view, dialogue resists a “priority of knowledge” and has an antecedence that points to the common origin of language and ethics. In my conclusion, I describe the resulting intersections and breaks and how a dialogue between Hegel and Levinas can be established against this background.

Although Levinas’s thinking has generated substantial attention for its emphasis on the irreducibility of alterity, an unconditional responsibility for others, and “ethics as first philosophy,” his accentuation of war and suffering, and hence “evil” in a capacious sense, as endemic to existence, has attracted less notice. In this paper, I explore the originality of Levinas’s reflections on evil in his essay “Transcendence and Evil” against the backdrop of his earlier identification of the “evil of being” and historical conceptions of evil as “privation of the Good” and theodicy. In shadowing the biblical Book of Job, Levinas’s insight into the “transcendence of evil,” with its tear in the fabric of being and disruption of subjectivity, represents, as explored in this paper, a striking departure from his previous considerations on evil and categorical rejection of theodicy, in its secular and theological forms, while nonetheless insisting on the redemptive breakthrough of the Good at the heart of darkness.

he following is an essay by Emmanuel Levinas, newly translated by Mendel Kranz, concerning Jewish culture and education, Hebrew studies, and Zionism. The essay was first published in 1954 in the United States by The Alliance Review, a small journal affiliated with the Alliance israélite universelle, and has since been almost entirely forgotten. In 2011–2012, it was republished in French by Denis Poizat based on the original draft found in the Alliance archives. Preceding Levinas’s essay is a preface by Kranz that situates it at the intersection of Levinas’s postwar project for Judaism, his relation to Zionism, and the colonial backdrop of the ENIO—three issues that are rarely considered together in Levinas scholarship. Poizat also provides some commentary on the question of education and the similarities between this and other essays by Levinas.

The aim of this article is to develop a novel interpretation of the significance of trauma and substitution in Levinas’s ethical thinking in light of the problem of temporality, language, and the question of what it means to be a created being. With an emphasis on Levinas’s style of writing, the intersections of Derrida, Husserl, and Freud in his thinking, and the “two-times” of traumatic temporality, the argument of this article seeks to understand how responsibility for the other is crystallized through the trauma of the Goodness and expiation for the impossibility of enduring its unforgiving demand.

Levinas’s conception of justice in Totality and Infinity is very different from the one developed in Otherwise than Being. Both are bound to the presence of the third party next to my neighbor. But whereas in the later work this presence leads to transform the responsibility of the I for the Other, to compare the neighbor and the third party for the sake of justice, hence to enter the sphere of visibility in which retributive justice is possible, it opens in the early work to a fraternity of all humans, understood as a community of language, of expression, teaching, and commandment. Here, justice is a right to speak. I argue that these conceptions of justice are not only different. The early one can also be seen as the condition of the later one. And Levinas refers explicitly to it in Otherwise than Being as a justice that passes by justice.

By examining the ambivalence around the application of the concept of religion to Judaism at the first meeting of the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de langue Francaise, this essay shows how Levinas’s employment of the term in Totality and Infinity and after emerged in and through the cloaking of Judaism in the terminology of Christianity, a procedure which began with Levinas’s reception of Catholic thinkers such as Paul Claudel and Jacques Maritain in the 1930s and developed through his interpretation of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption at the second meeting of the Colloque in 1959. Rather than a straightforward appropriation of the Christian conception, religion is a term for Levinas designated to register what it is to be stunned by the Christian gaze. The reclamation of the term, the essay argues is itself a kind of therapy that embraces the designation of scapegoat as Judaism’s historical mission.

For Kant and Levinas, the categorical imperative is the only possible formula for universalization. It has a structural necessity. Its claim is ultimate, valid without exception, and therefore reason-based. What differentiates Levinas from Kant is Kant’s assumption that “pure reason, practical of itself” is “immediately lawgiving.” Levinas contradicted this form of reason legislating itself as an end in itself: according to Levinas, reason has no self-generated power. Although both agree that the achievement of an ethical insight depends on “passivity,” in contrast to Kant Levinas does not consider this “passivity” to be part of a conceptual insight. Its place is outside the subject. Instead of an “archetype” that already exists in the subject, Levinas advocates the conception of a counter-image whose form is based on the face. This face is not speechless. His speech is based on a universalizable commandment, namely the commandment: You shall not kill me. In its full extent, this claim can only be understood via a body-based understanding of the categorical imperative.

A question opens up a space between self and other in the very act of expecting a response. As such, it can be a form of world-building. Posing a question might reveal what is or it might push interlocutors to revise what is. Levinas counsels us to question the first attitude toward questioning in order to open ourselves up to the second. Using questions and answers from a trial of a former child soldier at the International Criminal Court, this paper explores the ethical ramifications of the choices we make when we pose and respond to questions.

Levinas’s notion of fraternity and his conception of an ideal human society recover themes from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century social and political thought. In this paper I show how Levinas’s thinking can be illuminated by examining the conceptions of community that we find in Martin Buber’s dialogical thinking and in Franz Rosenzweig’s concept of redemption and redemptive community in The Star of Redemption.

I argue in this paper that habits of moral attention, such as those that sustain racism and xenophobia, should be understood as attempts to deflect responsibility as Levinas describes it. The provocation to responsibility is fragile in the face of these moral habits, which separate the morally considerable from the morally inconsiderable. But in its traumatic quality, responsibility cannot be deflected entirely—it impacts the self prior to and outside of our attempts to manage our obligations. Levinas’s description of the interaction between the conatus and responsibility should thus be read as a supplement to critical race theory, as an account that recognizes the power of moral habits but also the constant possibility of their interruption.

Rabbinic Talmudic tradition is marked by chains of tradition, integrating written Scripture (as prooftext) and oral Traditions (as exegesis). The interrelation of word, voice, and instruction is paramount. Levinas’s reading of Talmudic texts follows this format and continues this tradition, by superimposing his voice and philosophical concerns. I have chosen his reading of Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Makkot 10a as an exemplum. In the process, Levinas’s style and method can be seen as a contemporary meta-commentary on the ancient rabbinic source.

This article focuses on a Talmudic lecture Levinas delivered in 1965. Its long central section is an extended reading of most of that lecture’s images and ideas. Its frame, however, treats what does and does not change in Levinas’s conception of the State of Israel between the early ’60s and the early ’80s. At issue here are two other texts: a short but important paragraph from the 1961 lecture published as “Messianic Texts,” and the interview with Malka and Finkielkraut that took place in 1982, shortly after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The gist of my closing argument is that while the structure of the understanding of Israel he outlined in 1961 does not change, it is developed very differently in the 1965 lecture and the 1982 interview. I try finally to account for this difference. In the meantime, the long analysis of 1965’s “Promised Land or Permitted Land” offers a novel account of Levinas’s hermeneutic, an account that might perhaps be applied to other Talmudic lectures.

In accounts of Emmanuel Levinas’s relationship to the Jewish theological tradition, scholars often analyze Levinas’s essays about Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin, and specifically his 1824 book Soul of Life (Nefesh ha-Ḥayyim). This article treats two essays that Levinas wrote in the mid-1980s on that book, and shows that Levinas’s praise for that book involves coming close to endorsing its theology of suffering, a theology that strikes this article’s author as obscene. In Nefesh ha-Ḥayyim, those who suffer deserve their suffering, their suffering is in proportion to the sins that gave rise to it, and their suffering purifies and atones for their sin—in the language of the Jewish theological tradition, “it is God’s way to sweeten bitter with bitter.” This marks a departure from Levinas’s standard treatment of issues of theodicy in essays such as “Useless Suffering” (1982). In the article’s conclusion, the possibility is raised that Levinas’s account of divine illeity liberates theologians from problems of theodicy.

The aim of this article is to emphasize the notion of accomplishment in Levinas, partly building on the unpublished works of the author, where it appears as a keyword of his philosophy. It is a matter of highlighting the double filiation of this term, as an extension of the Husserlian notion of intuitive fullfilment to the entire existence and as a resumption of the hermeneutical and theological notion of figural interpretation. By showing how Levinas applies the structure symbol-accomplishment to the existence, envisaged in its double dynamism of position and participation, this article intends to emphazise the importance—but also the difficulties—of the notion of history in his philosophy.

Although Levinas frequently references Plato positively, they are engaged in different philosophical enterprises. Whereas Levinas takes his place in the tradition of modern moral philosophy for which the atrocities of the twentieth century are undeniable burdens, Plato is concerned with cultivating dispositions that promote psychological and social harmony. For Levinas, Plato’s Form of the Good signals a dual commitment, on the one hand to the primacy of ethical action to existence, and on the other to the connection between ethics and transcendence, in the sense of absolute otherness or separation. But this reading is anachronistic.