“Works 4. File “Totality and infinity”, unpublished”, by Emmanuel Levinas, texts established and annotated by Dan Arbib and Danielle Cohen-Levinas, with the collaboration of Nicolas Rault, Bernard Grasset/IMEC, 798 p., €35 , digital €34.
It is striking that one of the most influential books of French philosophy in the 20the century, Totality and infinity. Essay on exteriorityby Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995), was published by a Dutch publisher, Martinus Nijhoff (1961; Pocket book, 1990), Gallimard having refused it – to the great despair of its author. Inflecting the thinking of his two philosophical mentors, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Levinas imposed an ethical turn on the philosophy of his time. From a commentator, he became a thinker in his own right. Constantly republished, this work has since continued to irrigate the most current reflections. Essential notions are developed there such as that of “face of others”the face of the other who calls me, even if it is to ask me for bread. Notions which inspired the theories of “vulnerability” which we find, for example, in the Frenchwoman Corine Pelluchon or the American Judith Butler.
However, at the time he published Totality and infinityLevinas, without a university position, supported only by Jean Wahl (1888-1974), dedicatee of the work, was withdrawn into a cultural isolation which did not suggest his late fame. An untimely object, this major book, destined to become a classic, then had the appearance of a meteor whose irruption was only noticed by a few – the young Jacques Derrida, in particular, who devoted a long article to it. published under the title “Violence and Metaphysics” in the Review of metaphysics and morality (1964). “Now we will have to reckon with Levinas”however, would have said Paul Ricoeur straight away after the thesis defense of which Totality and infinity was the support, in 1961.
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