Emmanuel Levinas: Essays on Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Jewish Thought - (Supplements to the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy)

About the Book

The overarching argument of this book is that we must read Levinas in his context. Levinas's complete context consists of four intersecting dimensions: phenomenology, hermeneutics, Bible, and Talmudic interpretation and debates. Only when we read him this way do we understand the originality of his philosophical contribution, and why it is indispensable to us in a secular time disabused of politics and striving to justify ethics.

Book Synopsis

These essays unfold a complex picture from phenomenology to Talmudic readings. The essays show how radically Levinas expanded genetic phenomenology toward preconscious and intersubjective affectivity. They discuss Levinas' appropriation of Heidegger's early hermeneutics as secular revelation of what-is toward a phenomenology of the unseen, adapting Maimonides' two-leveled conception of language. Pursuing the source of Heidegger's ontological difference to Eckhart, the book unearths the important influence of Maimonides on Eckhart, and Levinas' recourse to Maimonides' negative theology. It then explores two strains of biblical hermeneutics: a Hassidic source, via Buber, and a rationalist one, through Levinas. It closes with a consideration of politics, both revolutionary and that of "difference."