Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas

by Jill Robbins (Editor)

Recent debates within Continental philosophy have decisively renewed the question of the ethical, with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) as its center. Coming from yet in contestation with the phenomenological traditions of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas defines ethics as an originary response to the face of the other. For him, language is an exception to a habitual economy that represses alterity and maintains the asymmetry and distance constitutive of the nontotalizing relation to the other. Ethics occurs in the interlocutionary relation to the other, and interpellation―a kind of interruption by speaking―is the essential feature of ethical language. Between 1982 and 1992, Levinas gave numerous interviews, closing a distinguished sixty-year career. Of the twenty interviews collected in this volume, seventeen appear in English for the first time. In the interviews Levinas sets forth the central features of his ethical philosophy, previously enunciated in Totality and Infinity (1961), in a language that bridges to the idiom of his later work. He underlines his dedication to the phenomenological search for the concrete and the nonformal signification of alterity. He also elaborates issues that do not receive extensive treatment in his formal philosophical works, including the question of prephilosophical experiences and the ethical signification of money, justice, and the State. The informality of the interviews prompts Levinas to address matters about which he is reticent in his published works, notably the relation of his ethical philosophy to theological questions, the intrication of the Hebrew Bible in Greek philosophy, his substantial corpus of "nonphilosophical" or "confessional" writings on the Talmud, and recollections of his extraordinary talmudic teacher, Shoshani. The centerpiece of the volume is a previously untranslated 1986 interview with François Poirié. Containing Levinas's sole extended discussion of biographical matters with an interviewer, this text helps to situate Levinas in his contemporary intellectual world and to clarify his place in French thought.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction

322 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Jill Robbins is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the State University of New York, Buffalo

Reviews

[James Culbertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was the most comprehensive statement of Levinas' philosophy that I have read so far.

[Luke Brennan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Revision

While I generally agree with the direction of the statements that Levinas puts out, I don't think he qualifies as a philosopher nor his thought as philosophy since so much of his work consists of oracular pronouncements that don't even attempt to give reasons, even in principle.

Now, he might respond that, taking his start from phenomenology, he is trying to describe the fundamental basis of reality, and this can only be shown via a special phenomenological perception. This would be in a manner analogous to explaining the colour blue in that it can only be pointed to.

Yet, many of his claims are obviously extravagant, and it is entirely open to anyone to contradict him merely by disagreeing that the world looks like the way he said. However, while rejecting his histrionic way of putting things, where with abandon the buzzwords of metaphysics and ontology are thrown about, lots of agreement will be found for his core position. This would be the general lesson from a lot of world religions and philosophies that the ego must be conquered and a life in service to others is to be enjoined.

However, I think such injunctions could in truth be more adequately grounded in a better philosophical system, where reasons could be given and a better insight into things in general might be gained. He would reply, in response, that any philosophical system is a problem in that it belongs to the order of ‘Being’, and as such seeks to totalise social experience in such a way that personal existence gets force-fit into artificially sharp categories. Indeed, the relationship between the conceptual and the ethical would be the fight between ‘Being’ and ‘beyond Being’, and this would be the entire history of philosophy as but a series of differing methods to accomplish the same task of achieving this violent totality.

However, with all this, I see no serious intellectual work that gives the detail to these big florid claims so as to justify the invocation of the grand concepts of Being, ontology, metaphysics, or totality involved in these claims. I understand that in his own weighty publications this is absent to the same extent also. In general then, and in this book of interviews definitely, not very much philosophical work is done at all in the job of understanding reality, which is of course the job of the philosopher to do.

Now, in rejecting his stage setting of the fight between Being and what is beyond Being, as being just a dramatic metaphor, what then remains is his bald statements concerning personal and social experience. But this would not get him very far philosophically either. For even in Husserlian phenomenology, with its heavy emphasis on description, by philosophical work nonetheless Husserl tried to reduce the range of what can be described to simpler principles, such as to the transcendental ego. For ever since Thales the job of intellectual enquiry seems to have been to bring as much of the immense variety of experience under as simple a rule as is possible. In this way reduction would seem to be essential to philosophy and intellectual enquiry in general.

Now it doesn’t seem that Levinas provides any way in which superior insight is gained into experience by way of such a reduction. For while I and other people may agree with the headline statements, I can detect no work that justifies these statements existing in Levinas’ writings. As such it cannot be enough to merely state experience and leave things hanging at that. Therefore, with the proviso that I haven’t read any of Levinas’ full books, and don’t intend to, I still feel safe in saying that he is not a philosopher and his work not philosophy.

[Orest Mercator · Rating 5 out of 5]

He’s at his clearest in his interviews. This book is, in my opinion, largely more helpful than *Ethics and Infinity*, which contains two invaluable interviews (penultimate and antepenultimate, if memory serves) but is otherwise more obscure. In general, my feeling is that once you get to *Existence and Existents*, the main ideas are there and the rest is fine tuning. To be sure, OTB adds the semiotic element (already glimpsed in a more discourse-oriented in TI), but that’s just him taking his main idea and applying it to language. After the 50s, he’s mostly clarifying and refining IMHO (and I find “God and Philosophy” to be a helpful addendum to OTB), so these interviews are especially helpful as they occur so late in his career when things have only continued to crystallize.

[Sam]

"The Vocation of the Other"

[Aimee Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

This stimulated and stirred my own thoughts enough to write another book.

[Konrad · Rating 2 out of 5]

This repetitive collection of interviews (Q's from all different interviewers revolve around similar topics & Levinas responds, as one would expect, similarly. After 120 pages, these interviews seem so redundant that one thinks that Levinas's A's could be exchanged willy-nilly, one response for another, all across the span of the book, and there would be little lost) is more appropriate for the Levinas-noggins & his completionists out there. Not an essential conduit for his body of thought.