Heidegger as Levinas’s Guide to Judaism beyond Philosophy

Abstract

This essay reflects on the way that Emmanuel Levinas stages the difference between Judaism and Philosophy, namely how he approaches Jewish thought as a concrete other of philosophy. The claim is that this mise en scène underlies Levinas’s oeuvre not only as a discourse about the Other, but as a real scene of an actual encounter with otherness, namely the encounter of philosophy with the epistemic otherness of Judaism. It is in the turn to Jewish thought beyond Philosophy that the essay identifies Heidegger’s strongest influence on Levinas. The essay’s reflection is performed through a reading of Levinas’s first major philosophical work of 1961, Totality and Infinity. The encounter between Philosophy and Judaism is explored in this context both as an epistemic and as a political event.