Levinas and Biblical Studies

The current issue of Semeia, edited by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, is devoted to studies of the influence of Levinas on biblical studies and the influence of the Bible on Levinas. Ezkenazi's introduction lays out the basic categories and the fundamental flow of Levinas's thought. Reading it, I was continually reminded of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who is not mentioned (though Buber and Rosenzweig are): there's the same emphasis on the primacy of heteronomy and on the necessity of the Other to self-definition, the same resistence to "totality" (which ERH described as the "impurity" of his thought) and to Cartesianism, and the same attempt to root things in structures of grammar (though this appears less significant for Levinas than for ERH). (Oh my, I've talked about "same" when describing the work of Levinas.)

Here's one quotation from a commentator on Levinas (Robert Gibbs, in a book entitled Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas) that suggests a genealogical connection between Levinas and the Buber/Rosenzweig circle that included ERH. It also summarizes a good bit of my sense of how we should evaluate the postmodern "decentering" of the self: "It is ironic that, long before the current hubbub called postmodernism, the de-centered self was already discovered �Eand in an explicitly ethical context. Dialogical philosophers found that interpersonal ethics was the foundation of the self, or rather, that the subject was not its own foundation, but dependent upon others in order to be itself. And perhaps less ironic, the theme of that interpersonal self, that de-centered self, is directly correlate with traditional religious concepts. The antireligious agenda of postmodernism is not a necessary conclusion from the decentered self."

Two particular issues were of interest: First, the fact that Levinas connects alterity with eschatology, which means he may have some fruitful insights for an effort to demonstrate the systematic connections between Trinitarian theology and a Christian comic view of history. Second, and related to that first point, Levinas became well-known outside of France partly through Derrida's mediation, but Derrida renounces eschatology. Where does he go off from Levinas? At this point that must remain a question.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, October 24, 2003 at 06:30 AM

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