Emmanuel Levinas: Essays on Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Jewish Thought

Bettina Bergo, Ph.D. (1996), Université de Montréal, is Professor of Philosophy. She has published many articles on phenomenology, psychology, the history of philosophy, and critical theory. Her most recent monograph was Anxiety: A Philosophical History (Oxford, 2021).

• ContentsIntroduction1 The Face in Levinas: toward an Aesthetics of Responsibility/SubstitutionSummary1.1 The Ambiguous Face: Language or Immediacy, History or Perception?1.2 A History of the Face in Levinas1.3 What, Then, Is a Face?1.4 The Face as Expression; Art as Expression: Supposing the Face Were a Work of Art?1.5 The Insistence of Emotional Memory: Camp Raisko1.6 The Phenomenology of the “Un-conscious”: from the Insistence of Memory to “Substitution”—a Conclusion2 The Later Levinas: Substitution II (How to Radicalize a Phenomenological Epochē)Summary2.1 Time and Transcendental Consciousness2.2 Passive Synthesis and a Synthesis That Does Not Produce “Meaning”2.3 A Solipsistic Constitution of the Social?2.4 The Formalism of an Ethics of Renewal2.5 Levinas’ Hermeneutic Expansion of Husserl3 Radical Passivity in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (Collège de France Lectures, 1954–1955)Summary3.1 Radical Passivity in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974)3.2 Institution and the Body3.3 Two Visions: the World, Ontology, and the Preconscious3.4 Merleau-Ponty on Sleep: the De-differentiated Body3.5 Merleau-Ponty and Levinas: the Hermeneutic Expansion of Phenomenology3.6 Sleep as Private Reality, Private World3.7 The Oneirism of Wakefulness and the Perceptual Quality of Dreams3.8 The Dream and the Phenomenological Unconscious3.9 Consciousness and Relationships with the World4 A Heideggerian Prelude to Levinas’ HermeneuticsPart I: Religious Thought as the Deformalization of MetaphysicsSummary4.1 Deformalization: Affects and the Renewal of Practical Philosophy4.2 The Course Not Given: Medieval Mysticism, Meister Eckhart, and Maimonides4.3 The Reconstruction of Categories: Heidegger’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle (the “Aristotle Introduction”)Acknowledgments5 “There Is a Sapphire”Part II Levinas’ Approach to DeformalizationSummary5.1 Introduction: Heidegger, Maimonides, and Levinas5.2 “L’Actualité de Maïmonide” (Published 1 January 1935)5.3 Formal Indication, Finitude, and the Being That Confers Existence5.4 Theorizing Service: Levinas and Maimonides5.5 Being as Physis or Nature and World: the Problem of Totality5.6 Metaphor and Language, Metaphor as Speech and Address5.7 By Way of Conclusion6 “The Jewish People Do Not Dream”: Paradoxes of Identification in Jewish WritingSummaryIntroduction: the Jewish People Does Not Dream6.1 Two Different Approaches to Jewish Texts: Buber’s Bible and Levinas’ Talmuds6.2 Buber’s Biblical Humanism6.3 Identification as Incorporation and the Transformation of the Voice6.4 Nakedness and Becoming6.5 Erum: Being Naked, and Shrewd6.6 The Psychoanalytic Counter-Narrative: the Birth of Anxiety in Transgression and Traumatism6.7 Freud and Buber: the Work of Foreclosure6.8 Oedipus and Moses: Paradoxes of Paternity6.9 Tragedy, Irony, and the Witz6.10 Anarchism and the Circle of Origin, or: Why the Jewish People Does Not Dream7 “And God Created Woman”: on Justice and Difference in Two Talmudic ReadingsSummaryIntroduction: Revolutions and Movements7.1 “And God Created Woman”7.2 To Form, Vay(y)itzer7.3 The Woman and the Human, and the Logic of Discovery7.4 Beauty and Form7.5 The Last Created, The First Punished (Face and Tail; Visage et Queue)7.6 Conclusion: Justice and Radical DifferenceAcknowledgmentsAfter Word, on the SapphireBibliography