Emmanuel Levinas

Life and

Career of Emmanuel Levinas

❖1906➢Born January 12 in Kaunas (or Kovno, in

Russian), Lithuania. Lithuania is a part of pre-Revolutionary Russia in which the then surrounding culture ‘tolerates’ Jews. He is the eldest child in a middle class family and has two brothers, Boris and Aminadab.

❖1914➢In the wake of the War, Levinas's

family emigrates to Karkhov, in the Ukraine. The family returns to Lithuania in 1920, two years after the country obtains independence from the Revolutionary government.

❖1923➢Goes to study philosophy in Strasbourg

(France). Levinas studies philosophy with Maurice Pradines, psychology with Charles Blondel, and sociology with Maurice Halbwachs. He meets Maurice Blanchot who will become a close friend.

❖1928–29➢Levinas travels to Freiburg to study

with Edmund Husserl; he attends Heidegger's seminar.

❖1930➢Publishes his thesis in

French, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenoloagy.

❖1931➢French translation, by

Levinas, of Husserl's Sorbonne lectures, Cartesian Meditations, in collaboration with Gabrielle Peiffer.

❖1932➢He marries Raïssa Levi,

whom he had known since childhood.

❖1961➢ Publishes his doctorate (ès

Lettres), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Position at the Université de Poitiers.

❖1994➢Raïssa Levinas dies in September.

Levinas publishes a collection of essays, Liberté et commandement (no English translation) and Unforeseen History, edited by Pierre Hayat.

❖1995➢Emmanuel Levinas dies in Paris,

December 25.

Totality And

Infinity

Levinas one of the most important work is totality and infinity: an essay on exteriority. In the later, Levinas, according to a phenomenological method, describes how subjectivity arises from the idea of infinity, and how infinite is a product of the relationship of self to another.

Levinas argues that ontology enacts a relationship with another being that reduces to the same. Instead, Levinas adopts an approach that does not reduce to other to the same, but considers the separation between himself and the other as inherent in a relationship with being.

According to Levinas, the externality is how individual transcends finite into the infinite. The externality is a relationship in which the self is separate from the other. The externality is a relationship where the being of self and other cannot be aggregated of fused to infinity, because they are completely separated.

In home, in order to have the idea of infinity relationship, the home members must be separated from each other. The idea of infinity is in itself a form of transcendence in a relation to the other.

The other is absolutely other than the self. The other is other oneself. The other is transcendent reality.

The idea of infinity requires the separation of the same and the other. This separation is a drop in the same and the other from the whole.

Levinas distinguishes between the idea of totality and the idea of infinity. The idea of trying to integrate all the different and the same in all is totality, while the idea of infinity maintains separation between the other and the same. According to levinas, the idea is all theoretical, while the idea of infinity is moral.

Face of the other is how other reveals itself. The face of the other is the exteriority of his being. Face to face is an ethical relationship, and calls freedom of self responsibility.

The importance of face

Levinas explains that the face of other talking to yourself. Language begins with the presence of the face with the expression. Language is a system of interaction in which meaning is derived from the face of the other. The other is the signifier, which manifests itself in language by the production of signs.

Face, this absolutely other, is not a negation of the self. The presence of the other does not contradict the freedom of self. I can kill the other, but his face reminds me of my responsibility.

Prepared by: Base, Cliff Levin Berdin, JesusCastillo, JoshuaDominguez, ReynatoNarciso, BonnySario, John Carl Angelo