Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) studied philosophy at Strasbourg University in France. He spent the academic year 1928–9 in Freiburg, Germany, where he took seminars with Husserl and then with Heidegger. He was interned as a prisoner of war in a German labour camp during the Second World War and most of his Jewish family were killed in the Holocaust. After the war he was the Director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris until 1961. From 1947 to 1949 he studied the Talmud. His first university appointment was in 1964 as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Poitiers and then at the newly established Paris X University Nanterre in 1967. He was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris IV) in 1973, where he remained until his retirement in 1976, after which he held an honorary professorship. He held a visiting professorship at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland from 1970. His works include Existence and Existents (1947; English trans. 2001), Time and the Other (1948; English trans. 1987), Totality and Infinity (1961; English trans. 1969), Difficult Freedom (1963; English trans. 1990), Quatre lectures talmudiques (Four Talmudic readings; 1968), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974; English trans. 1981), Dusacré au saint (From the sacred to the saint; 1977), Ethics and Infinity (1982; English trans. 1985), De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Of God who comes to the idea; 1982), Entre Nous (1982; English trans. 1998) and God, Death and Time (1993; English trans. 2000). This chapter outlines the paradox of exploring Levinas’s philosophy in relation to film in the light of his early polemical work on aesthetics. In line with recent scholarship, however, the ensuing discussion seeks to establish a more enabling relationship between his philosophy and cinema. Focusing on what Levinas has to say about images, movement and, especially, time, this chapter offers Levinasian reflections on time and mortality, with a view to critically expanding discussion of the ontology of photography and film.