The Century of Useless Suffering Alain Finkielkraut Reads an Essay by Emmanuel Lévinas

Abstract

Born in Paris in 1949, Alain Finkielkraut had the paradigmatic educational formation of the French intellectual: preparatory classes at a prestigious Parisian lycee, followed by entry to one of the Grandes Ecoles, in his case the Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint-Cloud. He passed the highly competitive agregation examination allowing entry into the teaching profession and has taught literature and the history of ideas in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique since the early 1980's. Finkielkraut has been called a secular disciple of Emmanuel Levinas,1 and the latter's intractable ethics of responsibility may be said to underpin much of Finkielkraut's thought. In 1984 Finkielkraut published La Sagesse de l'amour, a luminous introduction to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.2 The title inverts the traditional meaning of the word philosophy the love of wisdom and comes from a remark made by Levinas in Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de l'essence: Philosophy, writes Levinas, is the wisdom of love at the service of love.3 This article takes its title from an essay published by Levinas in 1982 in the specialist Italian journal of philosophy Giornale di Metafisica,