Out from 'Huis Clos': Sartre, Lévinas and the debate over Jewish authenticity

Abstract

This essay addresses Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of the Sartrean idea of authentic selfhood. It begins with a discussion of Sartre’s idea of ‘authenticity’ as developed in the philosophical treatise, L’Etre et le neant, and in the analysis of anti-Semitism in Reflexions sur la question juive. Next, it provides a short excursus on Levinas’s philosophical notion that the subject is constituted in and through its relation to the Other, so as to emphasize the strong contrast between the Sartrean and Levinasian models of the subject-other relation. Finally, it examines two short essays written by Levinas in response to Sartre’s Reflexions: first, the June, 1947 introductory remarks, ‘Existentialism and Anti-Semitism’, and second, the 1947 essay ‘Etre juif ’ (‘Being Jewish’). The essay takes up Levinas’s critique of ‘authentic’ or self-constitutive selfhood and concludes that the Levinasian subject, as constituted through alterity, is never ‘authentic’ in the Sartrean sense. In fact, Levinas’s philosophy would ...