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Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy, by Salomon Malka, translated by Michael Kigel and Sonja M. Embree. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. 330 pp. $21.50.
In addition to being a student and close friend of his biography’s subject, Salomon Malka is a writer and a journalist. Here he familiarizes readers with Levinas, the twentieth century Lithuanian-French philosopher and scholar of the Talmud whose groundbreaking work on one’s ethical responsibility for the Other person introduced a powerful new vocabulary and philosophy for post-Holocaust European thought and moral practice. Moreover, in Malka’s rich and illuminating text, readers not only encounter Levinas the philosopher and Talmudic commentator, but also are introduced to Emmanuel Levinas the man: the son of Lithuanian Jews, brother, student, friend, teacher, husband, father, grandfather, World War II prisoner of war, Holocaust survivor, and passionate thinker. It is this latter, more personal side of Levinas that English-language readers have been hitherto lacking. Malka competently adds the existential, historical, and cultural backdrop from which Levinas’s life and thought emerged. It is this account of Levinas’s life and legacy that Malka narrates most effectively.
Readers expecting an intellectual, straightforward, or fully chronological biography will be surprised here, if not potentially frustrated. Malka admits that he “decided to look less into the works themselves than into the archives, the testimonies of others, the personal encounters, the mark left on places passed by, the memories in the classroom and of anyone who can bring him to mind and talk about him” (p. xxxv). A longtime student and associate of Levinas’ at the École Normale Israélite Orientale (Enio) in Paris, Malka inserts himself and his personal experiences with Levinas into his text, producing an intricate and complex, yet eminently readable, interweaving of anecdotes and personal encounters. As Levinas’s philosophical and Talmudic writings bear witness to the uniqueness and singularity of the human face, Malka goes to great lengths to describe the “face” of Levinas in deeply personal terms, including as a family man and teacher. One could contend that this biography is a practical application of Levinas’s philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy recounts Malka’s description of the experience of the ethical encounter with Levinas, the Other person.
Two interrelated parts compose this book. Part One, entitled “Places,” comprises chapters 1–8. Here Malka describes the multifaceted environments that gave rise to Levinas, his pedagogical and scholarly work. Here the reader can follow Levinas’s footsteps from his childhood and traditional upbringing in Kaunas, Lithuania to Paris, where he spent much of his post-war life. Along the way, Malka recounts Levinas’s early and longstanding love of Russian literature, his exposure to the Hebrew Bible, and his academic studies in philosophy. Levinas’s studies took him to Strasbourg, France, then to Freiburg, Germany, where he attended classes of Husserl and Heidegger, the giants of German phenomenology. It was under the tutelage of these two figures that Levinas discovered the method for his philosophy.
In 1936, six years after obtaining French citizenship, Levinas enlisted as an officer in the French Army. In June 1940, his battalion surrendered to the Germans, and Levinas was placed in a prison work camp, Stalag XIB in Falingbostel. Here he spent five years in captivity. At this time, unbeknownst to him at the time, all of the close members of his Lithuanian family—father, mother, two brothers—were murdered by the Nazis. His wife, Raissa, and daughter, Simone, were saved by Levinas’s friend Maurice Blanchot. After the war, with very few exceptions, Levinas did not speak of the horrors of the Shoah, and refused to step foot in Germany ever again.
In the 1950s, Levinas encountered and studied under the enigmatic and brilliant master of the Talmud, Mr. Chouchani. After writing and publishing Totality and Infinity in 1961, Levinas’s intellectual star began to shine. Invitations to speak at public events quickly turned into more published essays, and his administration of the Enio flourished. From 1957 through 1989, Levinas participated in the French Colloquium of Jewish Speaking Intellectuals, and throughout these years, he frequently participated and offered Talmudic commentaries, on themes from “Temptation of Temptation” and “Promised Land or Permitted Land” to and from “Damages Due to Fire” to “Beyond the State in the State.” These commentaries are now collected, and available in English, in the following volumes: Nine Talmudic Readings (trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), New Talmudic Readings (trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (trans. Sean Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1990), In the Time of the Nations (trans. Michael B. Smith. New York: Continuum, 2007), and Beyond the Verse (trans. Gary B. Mole. New York: Continuum, 2007).
Chapters 9–19 encompass Part Two, “Faces.” Malka here highlights the formidable influences and fellow travelers who made a mark on Levinas’ personal and intellectual life. Here one will encounter some well-known figures, such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Blanchot. Levinas’s studies with—and his personal relationships with—these luminaries of continental European philosophy and literary criticism left an indelible mark on Levinas’s life and thought, some for the better, some for the worse. In addition to these four names, Malka introduces the reader to Levinas’s heretofore lesser known colleagues and interlocutors: Jean Wahl, Chouchani, Paul Ricoeur, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Roger Burggraeve, Adriaan Peperzak, Enrico Castelli, Henri Nerson, and others. Each of these individuals would both shape and be shaped by the life and thought of Levinas.
I have assigned Malka’s book as a supplementary textbook for an upper level undergraduate course on “Ethics After the Holocaust.” This course, cross-listed between Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, and Philosophy, will discuss a shift in moral theory from considerations of universality, unity, autonomy, duty, and consequentialism (prevalent in pre-Holocaust ethics) to reflections on singularity, diversity, heteronomy, responsibility, and intransitive hope (arguably central themes in post-Holocaust ethics). Levinas’s philosophy figures heavily in these discussions, and Malka’s biography serves students as a solid introduction to Levinas’s life and thought, not to mention the historical, interpersonal, and geographical circumstances in which his transformative philosophy emerged. This book, in addition to being a biography of Levinas, also serves as a witness or testimony to history: World War I, World War II, the Shoah, the birth of the state of Israel, decolonization struggles, and a life of engaged and passionate thought.
English-language readers owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Kigel and Sonja M. Embree for translating Malka’s French text (Emmanuel Levinas: La vie et la trace, 2002) into a very clear English. Nemo’s foreword and Kigel’s Introduction are not to be passed over. This outstanding text should be of interest to Levinas scholars young and old, those who work in post-Holocaust Jewish or religious studies, students and scholars of twentieth century European history, and general readers who are intrigued by the complex and mutually beneficial interplay between one’s life and thought. This biography exceeds its expectations in successfully narrating a story about Emmanuel Levinas the family man, the rigorous scholar, the passionate teacher, the Jew.
Michael R. Paradiso-Michau
Jewish Studies and Philosophy
Penn State University
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