Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations With Phillippe Nemo
Jill Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas
A person dear to me is finishing her PhD and MD in the near future. As I have been reading the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, I am continually reminded of how she has embodied a tireless responsibility over the last decade for the uprooted, the imprisoned, and the vulnerable.
Philosophy—love of wisdom—prevents one from going back to sleep.
Q: How, concretely, is responsibility for the other translated? A: The other concerns me in all his material misery. It is a matter eventually of nourishing him, of clothing him. It is exactly the biblical assertion: clothe the naked, feed the hungry, give shelter to the shelterless. The material side of man, the material life of man concerns me, and, in the other, takes on for me an elevated signification and concerns my holiness…. As if with regard to the other I had responsibilities starting from eating and drinking.
The otherwise than being is attested to by exceptional people, by saints and just ones and by the “thirty-six unknown just ones” to whom the world owes its continued life.
[Shoshani] didn’t teach piety; he taught the texts. The texts are more fundamental—and vaster—than piety.
[Before the face of the other] I am he who finds the resources to respond to the call.
The study of the Torah is this infinity that is never finished, where the light gained illumines above all the insufficiencies of the light acquired
The face offers itself to your compassion and to your obligation.
