Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Emmanuel Levinas
Details
This, the fifth episode in our series on Jewish Thinkers of Otherness, turns to the dark and mysterious philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
Rather than attempting a panoramic survey, I will dissect just one decisive organ: escape.
In his 1935 essay De l’évasion, Levinas asks why finite beings feel compelled to take leave of themselves.
A familiar scenario:
- We hurt. We brace. We harden. We push back against what presses in on us—facticity, embodiment, mortality.
- Yet the very act of bracing becomes another form of enclosure.
- Existence can feel heavy, surrounding, inescapable.
- What is this recurring impulse to break out of oneself?
From this early meditation on escape, we can glimpse the later Levinas. Transcendence will no longer mean securing myself against my limits. It will mean interruption. The other person—the face—will emerge not as an object in my field, nor as a concept to be subsumed, but as a demand that precedes my projects.
Our guiding question will be: When we try to escape our finitude, what are we really fleeing—and what would it mean not to flee?
But before that, we will review the history of phenomenology from Kant through Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.
Jewish Thinkers of Otherness: Buber – Arendt – Levinas – Derrida
This series will examine four distinct ways whereby the Other becomes a decisive philosophical event: as presence, as plurality, as ethical asymmetry, and as structural difference.
Each session focuses on one thinker and one conceptual pathway, presented by a brave member of our community—currently experiencing performance anxiety about presenting to a group of critical Others. But they have no need to worry, because Jedi Master Professor Steven Taubeneck will be on hand to answer the hard hard questions and prevent us from cheating, lying, fabricating, speculating, and bluffing.
METHOD
TBA
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.