Levinas’ masterwork Totality and Infinity begins with the notion of war as the “normal” human condition, a condition that corresponds to generative anthropology’s idea that human language and the sacred emerged to defer the violence resulting from our growing mimetic intelligence. Prof. Gans will show how Levinas’ key conception of “the infinite” that makes the face of the other an experience of strangeness and transcendence–and peace– is situated within the generative scene of human origin.

Never, to my knowledge, has any philosopher as such, in his properly philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such, contested the legitimacy of the death penalty” observes Jacques Derrida in the course of his two-year seminar on the death penalty. What significance should we attribute to this absence of philosophical argument against capital punishment throughout the Western tradition? This talk will address that question with reference to, among others, Levinas.

Rarely have so many Americans expressed so much anger about the presidential candidates on offer. Reality star and real estate developer Donald Trump is running the most unorthodox "populist" campaign in American history after having hijacked his party’s nomination, all the while alienating all but his most ardent supporters. The Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, is a Washington insider with vast political experience and almost as much political baggage. Running in an era when voters in both parties seem eager if not desperate to blow up the establishment, she’s faced repeated questions about her record and her ethics. What does this tell us about the current state of American politics?

The involuntary, receptive nature of hearing makes it unique among the senses. We can close our eyes to avoid sight or refrain from touching or tasting, yet it is hard for hearing people to not absorb sound. This basic condition of living in hearing bodies has haunted Western ethical thought about music and sound since at least Plato. More recently, the return to embodied vulnerability as a problem for ethics has highlighted the contemporary relevance of concerns about our availability to each other and our world in the act of listening. In this talk we will think about vulnerability in hearing and listening, how musical artists have engaged our aural vulnerability, and what kinds of ethics this common condition might provoke.

In the lecture course “Death and Time,” Levinas criticizes Heidegger for the way in which death for him isolates the human being: I encounter death, first and foremost, as my death. Hegel, says Levinas, does not do this, which ought to place Hegel in proximity to Levinas himself. And yet Levinas’ discussion of Hegel in these lectures is strangely detached: Hegel‘s name is barely mentioned outside the lectures in which he is central. Why is this? Are there Hegelian lessons Levinas has not learned? Or does Levinas think that Hegel’s treatment of death so deficient, in some other way, that it does not deserve further mention?

Round Table co-sponsored by the Alliance Française of Los Angeles with Zhenya Gershman (art historian) Louis Stern (gallerist), Fred Goldstein (Vice President of LACMA), and Christian GRUSQ (AILS President). Debate moderated by Prof. Jean-Claude Carron, AILS Scientific Director.

It is not surprising that in the memoirs and fictionalized accounts of early Jewish settlement in the rural American West, there is a marked concern with Christian neighbors’ perception and reception of the Jewish community. In particular, this real and imagined gaze of the Christian other punctuates Western Jewish homesteader, cowboy, and small town settler narratives, alongside a predominant focus on issues related to Jewish family relations and Jewish observance. Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of ethical relation as determined by the encounter with the other serves as a remarkably apt model for understanding Jewish systems of belonging and assimilation in the American West of the late nineteenth century—almost. This presentation focuses on a seemingly exceptional case, that of Wyatt Earp’s Jewish wife Sarah Josephine Marcus (“Josie”) Earp and the set of larger than life memoirs and biographies devoted to her. The example of Josie Earp in turn helps illustrate a major difference between the Levinassian model of ethics and that of Jacques Derrida.

The ultimate goal in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been to construct a machine (in today's terms, to program a computer), which can simulate any and all aspects of human intelligence (e.g., logical reasoning, creativity, ability to learn, ability to communicate in a natural language, etc.). As a field of study, AI has a long history. Indeed, over the centuries, some relatively simple aspects of human intelligence have been successfully simulated by mechanical means. However, the advent of the computer stimulated the research in AI, and among other accomplishments, the human ability “to think logically” was effectively simulated. We will present a survey of AI's accomplishments and address its future from a technical and ethical point of view.

This panel will explore hidden layers of literature and paintings. By focusing on works of art by Rembrandt Van Rijn and Franz Kafka, we will discover these men's unique ways of creating through mystification, concealment and parable, and learn how their artworks are connected to Jewish philosophy.

The talk is borrowed from the award-winning 1971 film by Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos. The film tells the story of the surprising treatment of a 16th-century French explorer by a tribe of cannibals. The historical encounter with the New World and the discovery of totally new civilizations raised the question of the “other” for Europeans. One of these encounters occurred when French Catholics and Protestants, having settled in the bay of Rio de Janeiro, came into contact with the Topinamba people, practitioners of cannibalism. We will see how this encounter with the so-called “savages” helped early modern writers reassess their sense of moral certitudes.

In light of the last Presidential election and given this administration’s policies, Prof. Hinojosa will address a series of questions related to America’s fear of the “dangerous” Other, asking if the country ceased to be great because of illegal immigrants overrunning the borders and because of unfair international trade agreements like NAFTA and TPP which produce trade deficits and hurt working Americans. Political economist and anthropologist, he will also invite us to contemplate the ethical responsibilities of countries at the receiving end of immigration to show altruism towards the Other.

Round Table co-sponsored by the Alliance Française of Los Angeles. We addressed painting from a sociological and philosophical point of view, as communication and aesthetics, including Levinas’ misgivings about image.

Round Table co-sponsored by the French Quarter Magazine in Las Vegas, NV. From the first gambling halls to the multi-billion dollar resorts that currently line Las Vegas Boulevard, Southern Nevada casinos have sought to be “the other” to visitors and gamblers eager to escape their everyday lives. Along the way, those casinos have toyed with history and identity in their efforts to appeal to patrons. From the faux-authentic trappings of the Arizona Club (1905) to the faux-authentic trappings of the Last Frontier (1942) to the genuine replica statuary of Caesars Palace to the themed resorts of the 1990s, Las Vegas casinos have always sought to portray themselves as something more—and less—than what they really are.

Round Table co-sponsored by the Alliance Française of Pasadena. The more we understand about the universe, the more alien it seems. Modern cosmology has revealed a universe much larger than the world of our experience, dominated by things like "dark matter" and "dark energy" that are very different from the stuff of which we are made. Meanwhile, physics has introduced the mysteries of quantum mechanics, according to which reality is made of very different things than the conventional picture of objects with positions and velocities. I will describe some of these findings, discuss how many people have been resistant to accepting such a counter-intuitive picture of the world, and suggest that perhaps this is simply what we should have expected all along.

About a century after Columbus landed in an island of the Americas, Montaigne reconsidered various aspects of the encounter with the Other by commenting on travel narratives reporting on such experiences. Like many contemporaries writing about the implications of these events, he had a specific political and religious agenda in mind, yet his views on alterity in the Essays provide insightful perspectives on a crucial problem of our time.

In 1969, Jewish-Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen composed “Story of Isaac” (1969), a reference to the biblical story of binding and (non-) sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. Told from the perspective of the son, Cohen draws out an aspect of the traditional tale that is often overlooked: the undecidable nature of Abraham’s decision, and of Abraham’s status as ethical subject. I want to think about Cohen’s version of the Akedah—in close dialogue with Kierkegaard’s, Levinas’s and Derrida’s readings—as a strange work of ethical philosophy in which decision guards a terrifying kernel of undecidability, in which ethics is represented as violent at its very core.

Brian Treanor  on Levinas’s treatment of the il y a, the anonymous “there is” of being. Should we experience it as a “menace,” as Levinas himself suggests in De l'existence à l'existant? As a source of fear, as Pascal experienced le silence éternel de [les] espaces infinis?

Brad Elliott Stone on white jouissance, black substitution: a levinassian reading of James Baldwin.

Paul A. Harris on Levinas’s “How to Think Nothingness?” in God, Death and Time, and explore relations between nothing and time. Levinas emphasizes the “inaccessibility” to “pure nothingness” in Western thought, citing Kant, Bergson, and Aristotle in the process.

Round Table co-sponsored by the Alliance Française of Los Angeles.

Round Table co-sponsored by the Alliance Française of Phoenix.

Bringing Emmanuel Levinas to bear on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, my premodern test case, has the virtue of recovering what is authentically other.  Because Levinas refuses to leap to conclusions about values, about human nature, even about God’s nature, his phenomenological speculations regard the reality of existence as ethical encounter in the world itself—ontological questions are, for him, already ethical ones—Levinas is a textual and cultural critic of enormous value.  Works of art are, for him, mediators between the consciousness of an author and that of the reader, mediators that disclose aspects of the being of humans and their worlds.  Levinas makes cultural and historical assessments, including self-assessments, and not just for the medieval, possible.

Emmanuel Levinas writes in Humanism of the Other Man: "To perceive language from the revelation of the Other...freed from any culture, in the nakedness of his face - is to return in a new way to platonism".   For Greek thought, the allegory of the Cave appears to be about the paedeïa, either education or culture, that is, knowledge received through teaching in the broad sense. By putting into images the distinctions between the different forms of knowledge exposed in the image by a segmented line, how can the soul climb the steps of knowledge, pass from conjecture, to belief, then from these to the intelligible? However, the story told of the Cave would proceed from an opposite and complementary movement of the procession: that of conversion, which sees each being go back to its principle, beyond being. Yet Plato himself describes his text as an image (eikon), and then we should talk about the image of the Cave. But an image is frozen, illustrating more than it teaches, and in La Caverne, we are faced with a text depicting an adventure, with a very explicit temporality.   How then to qualify this teaching in reality? Allegory? Myth? Metaphor?

In Levinas the experience of others takes the form of the face. What is the face?

The face should not be understood in the literal sense: the face of man exceeds all possible descriptions (colour of the eyes, shape of the nose, ...) Levinas describes the face as a misery, vulnerability and destitution which, in itself, without the addition of explicit words, begs the subject. « But this supplication is a demand » for a response, a demand for support and help.

« The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes, according to Plato’s expression, to his own assistance. He at each instant undoes the form he presents….The face is present in its refusal to be contained » (Totality and Infinity)

Bioethicists love provocative questions.  A recent one, “can a robot be a person?” points to a doubt, a puzzlement about the nature of personhood with respect to its attributions.  To be able to adequately address the question entails reconstructing the entire trajectory of modernity, so as to make sense of the intellectual paradigm that brought about the tremendous advances of science and technology.  The issues raised by robotics and artificial intelligence find their cultural location within the space defined by such trajectory.  In my paper, I address the question: what does it mean to be a person? I do so, first, with a brief historical reconstruction, locating the current status questionis in Descartes’ dualism and his twin, if opposite, offspring, i.e., Hume and Kant.  In the more systematic part of the paper, and taking the lead from Levinas (and others close to him), I plead for a non-dualist version of personalism by articulating a notion of person as “incarnate singularity, coming to itself, in openness to the other.” 

During the writing of Totality and Infinity, Levinas seems to have had great doubts about his expression. Indeed, linguistic hesitations can be perceived throughout the work. The preface thus underlines the importance of saying and de-sailing. Then, the syntactic difficulties related to the use of the verb to be, the variations in typography and punctuation, and the grammatical approximations show how Levinas struggles with language. When Levinas quotes Rimbaud in the introduction and conclusion of the book, "Real life is absent. "The difficulty of talking about the relationship with the other, the movement by which one goes out of oneself, appears. The text of Totality and Infinity thus marks stages in an effort of formulation. Language is not considered as preaching, but as performativity.

This observation is redoubled when translating Levinas. Indeed, for a translator, giving an account of a philosophical gesture implies entering into a dynamic of transformation. It is not just a question of transmitting a message, but of being able to respond to a choice of translations. In other words, to translate Levinas is to enter into a process of variations of oneself and of the other.

This presentation is be based on Prof. Zhu Gang's account of his experience in translating Totality and Infinity into Chinese".

In September 1975, the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas delivered a lecture in Meched, Iran, during the Entretiens de l'Institut International de Philosophie, whose context of the place is worth to itself a not inconsiderable importance.

The text, in part, was first published in 1978 in the journal "Critique", published by Editions de Minuit, and then published in a book by Levinas in 1982 entitled "Of God Who Comes to Mind".

What can come to mind that is not already , in some way, contained in it, or that is not already at the measure of the idea? 

This book suggests that meaning does not exists exclusively in the form of signifiers - as things, signs, words, as in a restrictive vision of phenomenology - but that it signifies, more anciently, from the human face. This is what is at stake in Levinas' overall work.

The chapter that takes up the presentation of Levinas's 1975 conference at Meched is entitled "The Thought of Being and the Question of the Other". 

Here Levinas immediately asks the question: "What does the intelligibility of the intelligible, the meaning of meaning, what does reason mean?" 

And he asks this question because he considers the relationship between meaning and reason as a prerequisite for philosophical study, because as soon as there is a crisis in philosophy, it seems that it is precisely because it becomes at some point unable to respond to its own criterion of meaning, hence an obligation to produce its own overcoming.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) was the first who introduced the term « Nihilism » into the German philosophical language, in particular in relation to Fichte's idealism. We will return to the circumstances and significance of his quarrel with the main philosophers of his time (Mendelssohn, Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Schelling, in particular), before examining the way in which Schelling tried to overcome Jacobi's criticism. This "historical" examination will be accompanied by a reflection on the very meaning of contemporary nihilism.

Nothing. This is the key word. From nothing, everything must be reborn: to annihilate the present in order to make the future possible; to give back to the future its purity; that of a future which is not a continuous present. Such was the intention of Russian nihilism. Would destroying be therefore the condition of the pure future? Would « from nothing (ex nihilo) everything is possible » answers the « nothing is born from nothing » of natural science? 

To be seen...

In his 1974 book « Otherwise than being or beyond the essence », Emmanuel Levinas explores a new understanding of human subjectivity, and writes:

"Beings always remain gathered - present - but in a present extending, thanks to memory and history, to the totality determined as matter, in a present without fissure or unforeseen, from which the becoming expels itself; in a present made, for a good part, of representations thanks to memory and history. Nothing is free. The mass remains permanent and the interest remains.... The immemorial is not the effect of a weakness of memory, of an incapacity to cross the big intervals of the time, to resuscitate too deep past. It is the impossibility for the dispersion of time to gather into the present - the insurmountable diachrony of time, a beyond of the Said. It is the diachrony that determines the immemorial, it is not a weakness of the memory that constitutes the diachrony"

For that he decides to untie the original "Self" by not following the paths opened by Hussert with the « transcendent Self » and by Heidegger with his « Dasein », but by starting from the most empirical experience of the ethical relationship.

In Aristotle, the role of memory is considered as a fundamental step in the constitution of reasons.

Aristotle addresses the status of memory in the first chapter of the Metaphysics, and asserts that memory capacity is a determining criterion to ensure intelligence to a living being.

Only man is able to rise from observation to reason, through experience and memory:

« (...) the human race rises to art and reasoning (logismos). It is from memory that experience for men comes: indeed, a multiplicity of memories of the same thing comes to constitute finally a single experience (A, 1, 980b30) »

In the Cahiers philosophiques of 2107, Michel Malherbe notes that “in a well-known text, Hume distinguished between two kinds of philosophy, the easy and obvious philosophy which deals with things that are important and the accurate and abstruse philosophy which studies curious things. The important things are important for the life of men and they make the matter of the interrogations of sense and value, that is to say of the existential questions linked to the human practice. Curious things make the matter of questions of truth such as abstract philosophy asks of itself, questions which require study and analysis and which may be unimportant.”

We will confront this proposal with that of Levinas’ philosophy on the notion of memory and being.

“My task does not consist in constructing ethics: I only try to look for its meaning “ wrote Levinas. It seems that this meaning is precisely the meaning of the other, which is ethical.

In the perenniality of this intuition that runs through all of Levinas' thought, it was also built at the crossroads of several civilizations with the classical Russian literature of the 19th century (Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc.) and also with the Bible.

Levinas himself will say that the “philosophical problem understood as the meaning of the human, as the search for the famous meaning of life” finds a deep illustration in the interrogations of “all the characters of the Russian novelists”

In the same way the Bible, thought as this book where “the first things are said, those which should be said so that the human life has a sense”, has an essential part in his philosophy as search of the sense of the human life.

The memory makes that we have a history; to have a history, it is to live.

The memory is thus the fundamental fact of the living; because the living lasts. Its consciousness extends on an infinity of plans, which go from the plan of the dream to the plan of the action; to dream, it is to plunge in the past; to act, it is to settle on the present.

In the dream, the self coincides with its memory; in the action, it coincides with the conscience of its body.

Justice and power are two opposing values in politics. Ethics in politics would require that power be consistent with justice, but realpolitik acts to reinforce power, and giving justice the primary role requires from the politician an enormous sense of responsibility for the highest common good.

Modern political thought conceives of ethical politics in the form of democracy, the regulation of power as an expression of the will of the people, whereas all forms of authoritarianism merely consolidate power in the will of the uncontested ruler.

From the point of view of the former, the latter represents political "irresponsibility", and it is interesting to note that the leading theorist of authoritarian governance, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, as well as Emmanuel Levinas, one of the leading theorists of ethical politics, both criticize irresponsibility by characterizing it in the same way. For them it is only an abstract and detached freedom: "political romanticism" for Schmitt, and "temptation of temptation" for Levinas. For these thinkers, irresponsibility promotes a pure freedom, a choice, over what is chosen.

For Schmitt, it is about the supremacy of the resolute will of the leader and the obedience of the people, while for Levinas it is about "difficult freedom", recognizing the primacy of the other, morality, and the protection of all others, justice, based on morality.

Contemporary philosophy often appears disinterested in the question of our ethical obligation to nature and the environment.

Yet in Levinas, and at the heart of his work as a philosopher, the meaning of ethics, responsibility, otherness, the vulnerability of the body, witness and politics, allow us to reflect on many of our most pressing contemporary environmental questions.

In particular, the otherness of nature, the vulnerability and suffering of non-human animals, the idea of an interspecies politics, the role of nature in ethical life, individual responsibility for climate change, and the Jewish conception of creation are all points of contact between Levinas's philosophical project and environmental thought.

It is in this that Levinas is also brought into dialogue with partners who reinforce this link, such as Henry David Thoreau.

Emerson and Levinas, two thinkers who are almost never associated, but share a way of persistently but enigmatically inviting, understanding the political significance and performative force of their philosophical writings.

In the disarming experience of astonishment, Levinas and Emerson seek alternatives to conceptions of politics that celebrate the "manly virtues" of fixation, resistance, and understanding.

They present manliness as a firmness or "fixity" that desirable political work could soften. Fixity does not account for a type of power that is so mobile, flexible or fluid that it cannot even be said to resist what it is ruling over.

A confrontation of their writings and thought allows for a new approach to their work, including the tension between Emerson’s political activism and philosophical thought, as well as Levinas's lack of reflection on the transitive force of his own writing.

The name of Levinas is often mentioned in medical ethics, and particularly in discussions concerning the relationship of care.

As a thinker of absolute otherness and passivity, he is frequently invoked, because the central themes of his ethics - suffering and vulnerability of the other, responsibility of the moral subject - are immediately evocative.

But if these concepts, and the particular meaning given to them by Levinas, certainly enrich the debate on the moral precepts framing the therapeutic relationship, they also shed light on only one aspect of the latter.

The fruitful contribution of Levinassian philosophy may therefore seem limited, yet its interest lies in the fact that it makes us see both the agent and the moral patient, the carer

and the cared-for, in a different light, insisting not on their autonomy and on the equality of their relationship, but on their vulnerability, on the passivity of responsibility and on the asymmetrical character of their relationship.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the most illustrious figures in American history, was a man of science and letters, a great inventor, the first American ambassador to France and one of the main architects of American independence.

He played an active role in drafting the three founding texts of this great American federation: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris and the U.S. Constitution, which to this day retains all its vigor and force in the United States, having defined the nature of political power in the United States of America.

It is on this basis, and considering the notions of power in the French philosophers Voltaire, his contemporary, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who questioned power and freedom in the twentieth century, that we will attempt to build some answers.

On October 1966, a symposium of intellectuals was held in Baltimore, and just as structuralism was about to enter the United States, a discordant and dissident voice was heard, that of Jacques Derrida, a speaker at the symposium.

He warns against the danger, under the guise of scientific positivism, of a return to the old problematic of "representation", at the heart of all Western metaphysics since Plato. In Heidegger's view, the Western tradition had already been opened by the pre-Socratics with a question: the question of being. But according to him, this question has been forgotten, and the fate of philosophy is the history of this oblivion, which culminates in metaphysics, which has reached the end of its possibilities and must now be "deconstructed", unobstructing the history of philosophy from the layers of successive interpretations.

Jacques Derrida, who became the figurehead of American elite culture in the 1980s and 1990s, was he the real birth attendant, in the Socratic sense, of the "woke" thinking of our time and the political implications it entails.

The philosophy of artificial intelligence attempts to answer questions such as:

- Can a machine act intelligently, i.e. can it solve any problem that a person would want to solve by thinking?

- And if human intelligence and artificial intelligence are fundamentally the same, then is the human brain analogous to an information processing process?

- Can a machine have a mind or consciousness similar to that of a human? And can it therefore sense how things are?

And the question for the philosopher is whether thought is a form of computation? There is a theory of computational thinking, developed in the 60s and 70s by American philosophers Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, which asserts that the relationship between mind and brain is similar to the relationship between a running program and a computer.

If we admit that the human brain is a kind of computer, then computers can be both intelligent and conscious, answering in particular the practical and philosophical questions of AI.

This idea has philosophical roots in Hobbes, Leibnitz, Hume and even Kant.

Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1655 in “Computatio sive logica”: By reasoning, I mean calculation [computatio]. When we reason, we merely conceive of a sum total from the addition of parts, or conceive of a remainder from subtraction, by which one quantity is subtracted from another. Reasoning, then, boils down to adding and subtracting, and if someone wanted to add multiply and divide, I wouldn’t object, insofar as multiplication is equivalent to adding equal terms, and division to subtracting equal terms as many times as possible. all reasoning, then, boils down to two operations of the soul, addition and subtraction.

The concept of civilization has evolved with the times. Thus, while in the 17th century, civilization defined the positive evolution of mores and knowledge, in the 19th century it came to describe the historically dated social and cultural whole, and we would then speak of “great civilizations” as political, economic, and cultural organizations in a defined geographical location, and not all civilizations would follow the same movement. If there are individual and collective evolutions of and within civilizations, how can philosophers contribute to the institutions that result from the expansion of interdependencies, power, and the transmission of knowledge

But the philosopher is not a king, for he is not made to lead a people, nor to seek a purely political or politician function. Nevertheless, his role, his philosophical commitment, can focus exclusively on the question of culture. And while he cannot create a civilization, he can prepare for its evolution or try to remove its obstacles. For Nietzsche, the philosopher’s role is civilizational, i.e., his function and work is to be a doctor of the civilization from which he has emerged, in which he exists and which will succeed him, and he understands himself as “philosopher as doctor of civilization”.

Inscribing himself in the interstices of society, the philosopher, or rather the philosopher-physician, makes a diagnosis and then decides to treat, maintain, or dynamite, according to the symptoms denoting a certain pathology, which seeks the remedy for the crisis, the suffering, the illness of civilization, but can at the same time become its “poisoner”...

In 2013, the twelfth issue of Cahiers d’Études Lévinassiennes focused on questions related to Nature, and today, as the question of a response from political philosophy to the environmental crisis becomes more prominent in American electoral political discourse, we wanted, for once, to return to it.

In the introduction to this issue of Cahiers XII, Carine Brenner, Editor-in-Chief, and Gilles Hanus, Director of Cahiers, put it this way:

“In philosophical language, ”nature”; designates the essence of a thing or being and does so in a variety of ways. The word refers either to what is common: that which makes it possible to inscribe distinct individuals in the same genus, or - and as if on the contrary - to that which singularizes each being and constitutes its inalienable proper. In this sense, it lies at the heart of the ontology from which Levinas sought to distance himself. As a genus, nature is in fact part of the Same; as a singularizing principle, it perhaps enables us to think in terms of the unique subject. What, then, is the nature of the subject? What kind of “being” is it? What, then, is the nature of other subjects?What is the “nature” of others, what makes them absolutely unique?

On the horizon of political philosophy, this is the question of anthropology: what is the nature of man? On what is the collective order founded? What structures enable it to exist? What, in other words, is “natural law”? This is a question that figures prominently in Levinas’s late works, as he is keen to find a Talmudic origin for it, even if this means that his texts may be distorted.”

With Levinas, we’re going to try to shed some light on it.

In the 1987 Bruntland report, which first defined the notion of sustainable development, the text states that we must meet “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, thus outlining a fundamental requirement that calls for a philosophical response.

The German term Neuzeit or New Times, translated as Modern Times in English, profoundly altered not only our relationship with time, but also with nature and technology, and the Galileo-Copernican revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries transformed both the system of the world and the status of man within that system, and by the same token the idea of progress. And “modern” man, deprived of the reference to an indisputable order where his place was assigned to him, all coherence and certainty seemingly gone, and left to his own devices, will turn to the horizon of history, which seems all the more predictable in that he believes he is now its master...

This fundamental presupposition - that of mastery - guides three major themes that make up the horizon of modernity: the idea that time is energized as a historical force, and that it opens up the lights of the future; the belief in acceleration, strongly linked to the idea of progress; and the conviction that history is to be made, and that it can be mastered by man. But today, these three elements are profoundly shaken. The hypertrophy of technical and instrumental rationality has called into question the very idea of “new times”, and we no longer adhere to the Enlightenment philosophy’s hope of seeing humanity’s march towards the better realized. In fact, the question underlying “sustainable development” has become a crucial one: that of the permanence of the common world, and not just what we share with our contemporaries, of course, but also with those who have gone before us and those who will come after us.

This new imperative of responsibility therefore goes beyond the contemporaneity and proximity of the relationship between the author of an act and its opposite number and raises philosophical questions in this discovery of an infinite conversation that we need to hear.

Time cannot be separated from eternity. “Moving image of still eternity”, according to Plato, in the Timaeus.