Why Levinas at the American Institute for Levinassian Studies?

Emmanuel Levinas is the figure who allowed the Institute to exist, the one whose name it almost bears, and the « almost » has great importance, because we are not a Levinas Institute.

Then why him?

Because it is distinguished by a certain singularity, which combines three ingredients rarely combined:

 1) a significant presence in the field of philosophy as a discipline of knowledge: Levinas is the introducer in France, at least one of the main introducers, of phenomenology, which constitutes the living heart of 20th century philosophy, with notably Husserl or Heidegger.

 At the origin of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl was the pioneer of a new method of reflection.

 For him, what matters is what appears to his conscience. Phenomenology is « the science of what appears to the consciousness ».

 2) a certain strangeness in the French and even European philosophical world, essentially composed of academics. However, Emmanuel Levinas was not a product of the French University, although he was a student of it and there was, in the end, only very late and when he was already internationally recognized and taught.

Levinas came from Lithuania. He was raised in Russian and only learned French at the age of eighteen for his studies.

And the influence of Russian texts is important, such as that of Dostoyevsky's latest novel « The Karamazov Brothers » is found in a sentence in this book:  « We are all responsible for all, for all men before all, and I more than all the others » 

Despite this « delay », it has established itself as one of the most original of French philosophers, and also for questions of style and writing.

3) Levinas was Jewish and had a particular relationship with the texts of Jewish tradition - both the Bible and the Talmud - which he questioned as thinkers and not as objects of devotion, reducing the gap between language and thought, knowledge and belief. Levinas therefore wrote a fairly large number of texts in which he refers to the Talmud to think. It is this mixture that produces its uniqueness and strangeness: that of a thought that dialogued with the great thinkers of its time, as well as with classical philosophers, and also with thinkers outside this world, allowing us to consider a scholarly critique.

This particular conjunction has produced, it can be said, a renewal in the field of thought.