A

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi everyone. My name is Amir Engel and I'm the chair of the German Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'm also a visiting professor at the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Today I'm talking with Elad Lapidot about his new book, State of Others, Levinas and Decolonial Israel, which came out with Indiana University Press in 2025. Congratulations on the book, Elad. It's great to have you on the show.

B

Thank you very much, Amir. I'm very honored and happy to be on the show.

A

We start with a request, as we always do. Maybe you can introduce yourself with a few words.

B

I'm a professor for Hebraic Studies at the University of Lille in France, teaching Jewish intellectual history and textual history. I'm coming from the discipline of philosophy and I have been writing and translating to Hebrew, European, modern European philosophy, mostly German and French, working on Hegel, for instance, Heidegger. And at the same time I have also been working on Jewish intellectual traditions and on the conversation between Jewish intellectual tradition and European philosophy, with a specific interest in Rabbinic literature and its relationship, yes or no, to Western philosophy and modern philosophy. And in this context I've been working on Theory of Talmud, a forthcoming book in September, but also on other thinkers that did similar conversation, such as Emanuel Vinass. That is the theme of my last book and if I understand correctly, what we're going to talk about.

A

Exactly. So that's exactly the project. So let's set the stage up for the discussion. The book, as I read it, is an attempt to synthesize, I think it would be fair to say to synthesize the entire philosophical project of one of the greatest post war French and Jewish thinkers, philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas. To a certain degree, it is also something of an intellectual history, or it has at least some historical perspective dividing Levinas work to early and late start, late philosophy, late thinking, you place the care if you wish, the turn point around 1967 to 1968. And I hope we get to talk about it a little bit more shortly. But maybe we could start by saying by asking you to explain to us a little bit, who is Levinas, why is he so important? And is he a Jewish thinker or actually a French philosopher? This is one of the main themes of the book and I'll be happy if you can expand a little bit about that.

B

Yes. So Emmanuel Levinas is both at the same time, one of the prominent European philosophers after 45. So in the second half of the 20th century period. He belongs in the canon of contemporary European thinkers or philosophers in general, because there is also an important reception in the Anglo American world. So today he belongs in the canon of 20th century greatest 20th century philosophers, Western philosophers, with the specific claim of bringing, of renewing the importance of ethics in view of ideologies and collapse of politics and crises and ontology. And he is the philosopher of ethics, one of the philosophers of ethics, and most famously at the center of the ethics, the responsibility toward the other person. So he's the philosopher of the other. This is his philosophical nickname. And around this he has exercised already a lot of influence during his lifetime, which only grew over the years and been received and has huge importance on many places and themes of contemporary philosophy, globally, worldwide. This is one thing that is Levinas. A second thing that is Levinas is that he's one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the same time, thinking about Jewishness, about Jewish themes, about Jewish history, about Jewish present, about Judaism, and a thinker that has become once again part of the canon of contemporary, modern, contemporary Jewish thoughts and has exercised and still exercises influence on all branches, I would say, of contemporary Jewish thought. And he's these two things together. But one of the enigmas or issues that my book treats is how he is also these two different things and how these two different things also created different Levinastases. And why did it happen, what meaning that this has and how we should deal with that.

A

Right, so let's start dealing with that and I want to start with your discussion on the early Levinas and especially on his early, most famous, probably most famous work, it's called Totality and Infinity and Essay on Exteriority, which was published in 1961. Maybe we can go into the subject matter itself and you could tell us a little bit more about what this book is about and what are the central concepts that this essay, this book, this project describe. What is totality and what is infinity? And how does it connect to the main issue at hand, which is, as you kind of already laid out, the relationship between the French philosopher Levinas and the Jewish thinker Levinas.

B

So I want to start my answer to this question by a continuation of the answer to the former question concerning more largely Levinas and his importance for now. So because it's connected to the second question on what is totality and infinity? Totality, Infinity is a title that seems to connect to very abstract concepts. My claim is that it also a title that puts one against one next to each other, but also one against each other. Two traditions of thought, Western philosophy and Jewish thought. And in a sense, my basic claim is that the entire project of Levinas is a aging of complex relationship between two distinct but not unrelated traditional thought, Western philosophy and Jewish thought. And it is the beginning of my answer why we have two Levinas, one philosopher representing Western philosophy, and the second Jewish thinker representing Jewish thought. And I say my claim is that the entire Levinasian project should be read as a complex intellectual event, historical event, that takes place between this, within this split subjectivity of the thinker himself, Levinas, between his philosophical side and his Jewish side, Jewish in the sense of Jewish thinking side. Now, this split and the drama within it interests me specifically in view of my own work that has been basically centered around this conversation or not conversation or tension between philosophy and Jewish thought. So in living nas, I find a certain precursor and someone from which I can learn, but also someone from whom I can learn the problems and the pitfalls of this kind of an intellectual project. And the pitfalls or the problems are not only on the level of the epistemic, philosophical, conceptual drama, but also has a strong political aspect, which is something that I also put at the center of the intellectual event that is Levinas and that we'll talk about, but that concern the relationship between the Jewish destiny, if you wish, the Jewish intellectual project that is also a communal project and political project, and the Western or broadly non Jewish, both intellectual and political project. And at the moment, it seemed to me that there is a moment of very deep crisis in this relationship, and that the part of this huge crisis precisely concern a certain staging of a conflict, a war, literary war, between a Jewish project and a non Jewish one, most clearly and tragically represented by Palestinians. But that goes beyond that. And I think this is therefore a moment where a figure like Levinas is an interesting site to ask these questions, especially because he is nonetheless the philosopher of the other.

A

So the. So the philosophy of the other is really, as I also remember reading myself when I was a student, is really grounded in this, in this text, in this project called totality and infinity. And I want to return to this, to this point, because I think it's important to try to flesh out a little bit further the staging into its component. So the staging of this conflict of two, what you call in the book two epistemes, or two ways of thinking and knowing. These two systems are represented, or could be represented through these two terms, totality and infinity. And their tension, the clash or the impossibility of their coexistence comes to comes to play through in this book. Tell us about this book, tell us what it's. What, what is it staging? Where does the totality meets the infinity? And what are the. What are the. The problems, the issue, but also the promises that this, this tension guarantees or creates.

B

Okay, so to begin with, the book itself, infini, published in 61, based on Levin Ras's doctoral thesis, or maybe today it will be more like habilitation, as they call it in French. Thesis is Levinas most well known and important book. Arguably there are two of them. Well, there are many of them, but there are two main books of Levinas philosophical books. It's totally infinity from 61 and otherwise than being from 74. And the one from 61 is more accessible and more well known. It's by no means simple book, but it's more readable than the later one from 74. So it has become the philosophical book identified with Living Nas that contains the concepts most affiliated with him, first and foremost, the other, the other person, the ethics of the other. And it is most often, and I would even almost hazard to say almost without exception, read as a book of philosophy and more specifically a book of phenomenology, that is the specific philosophical language and tradition to which Levinas was connected. And it is very often understood as a book of phenomenology that writes in the tradition of phenomenology, namely a book that mostly concern what phenomenologists have been dealing with, mostly the constitution of the individual human subject as a subject of knowledge or cognition or thought that's at the center of, you could say, the phonological scheme of thinking. And Levinas belongs to that. And totality and infinity can be, and is also a book in this tradition that at its center there is a description of phonology, of the emergence of a subject, of an individual subject through a complex process that concerns relationships with the being in the world, other things and beings, other human beings, a building of relation to them, relation to oneself, etc, etc, etc. At the end of the book there is also an opening towards a reality beyond the individual, some collective reality. And the book can be understood as one version of phenomenology, an interesting one that puts at its center what makes it so special. It puts its center the ethical relation, namely the subject is constituted not through a cognitive relation to the world, some kind of knowledge or understanding or perception, not even a, I would say, relationship to the world that is more existential than cognitive, but nonetheless always refers to the individual's possibilities of engaging with things in the world, like Heidegger would do. The importance of Levinas is saying no, the essential constitutive relationship that constitutes the subject is an ethical one, and it connects the subject's relationship to other people. That would be at the center of the drama that Levinas describes in the book. Now, all this is phenomenology. It's important and interesting. Phenomenology that, you know, negotiates with the great phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger, but also beyond phenomenology, the greatest philosophers of Hussein Thought, Kant, Hegel, Plato, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you could say at the center of the drama is a certain. A certain tension between totality and infinity, namely, to say it quickly, the emergence of individual subject is always being threatened by the tendency of being, of existence, to consolidate into some kind of a total system that at the end of the day erases the individual. So there is this tendency, and in order for it to nonetheless be an existence of an individual subject, there must be something that breaks through this logic. There must be some relationship with something that is not just another being, but something that goes beyond that. And this is what the Venus calls infinity. Infinity, the infinite, more specifically, the infinite non fini is something that lies beyond being, beyond the logic of totality, something that you could perhaps understand as divinity, something transcendent in any way. And the possibility of having a relationship with this infinite is what makes possible the existence of an individual, notwithstanding the totality of being. Something that is also similar. You can find it in Hermann Cohen. What is important in living us is that this infinite, nonetheless its manifestation is not God as such, but the other person, and more specifically, the face of the other person. The fact that I relate to this face is something that breaks the relationships of being and constitutes these extraordinary relations, an ethical one. So the infinite breaks through the totality and allows the existence of individual subject that is therefore constituted as ethical.

A

It sounds a little bit like Buber's dialogical relation.

B

Yes, there is a closeness both to Hermann Cohen and to Buber. The difference with Hermann Cohen, I would say it's that the infinite is not good as such, but more concretely, the other person, the face of the other person. The difference from Buber would be they had even some exchange on that is that Buber's ichundu is mutual. The Ich is being posited by the du and the duru by the Ich. And it's a conversation, and in the Vinass insists, it's not mutual. It's asymmetric. The ethical relations does not consist in a mutual recognition. It consists by solely one sided responsibility taken by the self vis a vis the other. But the other lies beyond that. The other is infinite. So there is no reciprocity. It's completely one sided. And this is a huge difference between them that also created a critical exchange between them.

A

Okay, so you've described Levinas as I am familiar with him, as I'm familiar with this work. And yet in your book you go a little bit beyond that and you try to stage this relationship as a relationship. And you already alluded to it earlier, you stage this relationship as a relationship not only between the self and the other in some kind of metaphysical or ephemeralogical way, but actually as a staging of a philosophical encounter. Or not a philosophical encounter, but encounter the creation of the west through the different traditions that mix them up. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.

B

Yeah, so as I said, this is the usual perception on reading of the book. And it leads, among other things, to people saying, you know, Levinas is immersed in some kind of a transcendent angelic ethics, which sounds very nice and commendable, but where is real life? Where is politics, for example, which is not absent from the book at all. But as I said, it's mostly towards the end that there is an opening towards collective events and terminology and it's not at the center. So Vinasso has often been accused of indulging in some kind of very abstract ethics and phenomenology and. And neglecting politics and concrete politics, history as well. Now, I contest this reading because I think the book needs to be read, as I said, within the bigger project of Levinas that, as I said, is based on the staging of a tension between philosophy and Jewish thought. What I claim is that the entire work of Levinas needs to be read as philosophical works that for him were phenomenological and that in the best tradition of phenomenology, indeed focus on some abstract individual subject. However, at the same time he's also working through Jewish texts, what he calls Jewish texts that, you know, it's debatable whether it's the best tradition of Jewish thought or not. But for him it means that there are texts that deal that speak in terms of both history. Jewishness is the historical phenomena and collective phenomena, namely political phenomena, historical political phenomena that are also very concrete. In these texts he speaks about actual events like the Holocaust, like the state of Israel, like revolution, et cetera, et cetera. Now, what I claim is that These texts need to be read next, the phenomenology needs to be read next to the Jewish text. And each sheds light on the other. And in a sense none of them is understood by itself. And therefore, I think also Totality and infinity from 61, which is a phonological book, cannot really be appreciated if it's not been understood as a larger project that also has Jewish, namely historical, philosophical elements that are even to some extent decisive. And what I'm saying is, therefore, although it's the Jewish texts that speak explicitly in terms of historical, political, let's say, events first and foremost, the event of the historical tension between Jewish thought and Western philosophy that in these texts are understood, is understood as kind of coming from a Greek, Roman, Hellenistic culture. The same tension is also negotiated in the theological book like to title Infinity, however, through a phenomenological, philosophical, a way of talking. And the philosophical way of talking is not historical and not political, but conceptual. And in the context of phonology, indeed focused around some kind of, I would call it a myth of a happening within the individual subject. So what I claim is that there is a certain. In order to read the book, as I, as I suggest, there is a work of translation that needs to be done, or as I call it, decoding. Decoding, namely, seeing in what way a certain conceptual drama is a code, or if you wish, an abstract version of telling, a drama that is spelled out in historical, political terms in the Jewish texts, so to speak, about the main drama, the conflict between historical conflict between Jewish thought and Greco Roman thought, namely Western philosophy within society and infinity. It is encoded through a conceptual phenomenological tension between first and foremost, society and infinity, two forces that in a sense play out in the constitution of the subject. However, I try to show that you could read within this context, this drama between the Titan and fear, as an actual drama between philosophy and Jewish thought that plays out within ephemnology of the subject, namely, the subject that, if we want to look at it, is the modern, you know, Greco Roman Jewish person, the Venus himself, or us, the moderns, is constituted by a tension between two main traditions, Greco Roman Western philosophy and Jewish thought. And the interaction between these traditions constitute the modern subject. And in this drama, the translation of as I said, totality is. Totality translates, as I said, the logic of being, namely, ontology, which the Venus understands as the basis of Western philosophy. Totality is the name for Western philosophy, Greco Roman thought, which is problematic because, as I said, it's effaces the individuals and doesn't permit this Is what Levinas sees as the big problem, any kind of moral taking seriously moral and ethical notions against that infinity, I already hinted that it's the presence of the divine, of transcendence is a code for Jewish thought that is based on a relationship to the divine. And for Levinas has at its center not the logic of being, not ontology, but rather inter, subjective, inter human relationship, namely ethics. And so totality, infinity is a book that tells story, in a sense a mythological story of the war between, you know, Greece and Athens and Jerusalem that nonetheless is not. Is not a. Does not remain simply a war, but becomes a complex dialectics in which, and this is my claim, the subject, modern man is at the bottom constituted by an inaugural, inaugural intervention of Jewish thought, an inaugural relationship to the divine, an inaugural act of taking responsibility for the others, namely the becoming of the subject as an ethical being. That is, however, then as this makes possible, then the development of. On. On this ethical basis of a subject that is rational, namely that actually performs the project of Western philosophy. However, this project of Western philosophy must never forget that its condition is ethics. So the modern human, modern culture needs to, at the end of the day, does not need to. Does not need to disavow, renounce rationality. However, it needs to acknowledge that this rationality must be subject and conditioned by ethics, the ethics, the responsibility for others. And in a sense, what I'm saying is therefore Levinas, what is saying after 45 61, he's saying Europe is fundamentally

A

Jewish or has to be. Is it? Is it? Or it has to be fundamentally Jewish. It is and always was.

B

Yeah, it is fundamentally Jewish and always was. And nonetheless, not only Jewish, not only Jewish, it has been Jewish and Greco Roman. But Europe cannot deny its Jewishness. And if it will, it will fall into totalitarianism. And in a sense, this is what happened.

A

Yes. So totalitarianism was the attempt to get rid of the Jewish, that is the ethical aspect of the tradition of thought, of subjectivity, say.

B

Yes, yes, yes, but it is a little more complicated than that. It is a little more complicated than that. Because the way that Levinas actually analyzes the crisis of the. Of the 20th century is not only or primarily a conflict between totality and infinity, but a conflict in which both totality and eternity face a third, even worse or even more complicated and complex power of being that has different names. That has different names. For example, in the earlier work, Levinas calls it Ilia, that is not even being. It's some kind of there isness. That is a power that that goes in its. Its effacing menace and threat even. Even beyond totality, to some extent even beyond totality and is embodied for the Venus by a tradition or a force that is neither Jewish nor Greco Roman but has again different names that all designate something that lies beyond Europe. Pagan sometimes he calls it Germanic is another word for that and what it means. It's kind of a power that goes against what he understands as civilization to cool and politically took shape through Hitler. And the key text for that is his text from 34 Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism. And the threat of Hitlerism for him is that it goes against civilization as such because it doesn't offer any kind of transcendence and anything else that is beyond like primary forces of race and the will to power.

A

It's.

B

Nietzsche falls for him also in this category. And this is the ultimate, so to speak. It is against this threat that any civilization, any constitution of the subject operates. It's the basic drive to avoid that and all civilizational powers. And for Levinas the. The two primary ones are the Jewish and the Greco Roman are already attempts to deal, to go away, to. To respond to this threat. And the two big responses are totality and infinity. This is the. The Greco Roman world is a response to in a sense evil if you wish evil.

A

The.

B

The effacement collapse of all. Of all civility and civilization. The Greco Roman response is a state, a state with universal laws that as such is not evil. Of course it's a response to evil, but nonetheless, and this is the issue of the Titan affinity leads to the effacement of the individual and therefore to a certain reproduction of the evilness of Hitlerism and levinas project after 61 is to say I want to offer a different response to the threat of Hitler which should not be totalitarian, which is not be just state and laws and universal laws, which he doesn't think itself is bad, but he thinks it's simply it's not enough or it's not the fundamental issue. He thinks there is a more fundamental issue. And the fundamental issue is the subject, the constitution of the subject itself. There needs to be an ethical subject or no state and no law will help to fend off totalitarianism. Namely Europe needs Jewish tradition. Yeah, yeah, fascinating.

A

So I mean I'm tempted to think a little bit about the Jewish side of Levinas but I feel maybe it's worth after all to move forward to the less known Levinas after you laid the ground so nicely and gave us this kind of perspective on The Levinasian Project and the attempt to rethink what it means, civilization in the wake of the Holocaust and World War II and Hitlerism. We set the stage with these two grand concepts and the encounter and the desire, the need to stage the continuous discussion, the dialecting between them. But things change somewhat. Moving on to what you already said is less known, more difficult to understand. And that is his second big master project from 1974 titled Otherwise Than Being or Beyond the Essence. Right. So maybe we can. We could start by having you sketch out a little bit the distinctions, the differences between these two grand projects. Because on the face of it, they're similar. On the face of it, also, otherwise than being also has this kind of dual structure, similar to totality and infinity. How is it similar and what is the most important distinction that you draw with this second later project?

B

Yeah, so I think the best way to approach it would be to go back a little to the methodological intervention of the book. I already said that one point is reading Levinas as a staging of a drama between Western philosophy and Jewish thought. A second aspect of my book is to say that this project has two phases, two historical phases that offer two different stories. And in that I draw a line, historical line, in the development of Levinas project. The line I draw, as you mentioned, is around the year 67, 68. So I'm speaking about Levinas early Levinas, later Levinas, Levinas before and after levinas, I, Levinas 2. It's not something that people has not been doing at all. People pointed out that there is a development. However, I'm pushing it further, I think, than other people by saying there is a real break. There is even a. You mentioned about Keira, there was a turn. A turn means a turn of a thinker against the themselves. So it's not just the development of one project from an early stage to a more elaborate, whatever second stage. I offer that there is a real self critique of Levinas that takes place. And in this sense, the second Levinas, the later Levinas is not just a development, but a critique of earlier Levinas. And in this sense it's a real turn, a real care. And I claim that this goes through the entire perimeter of the project, namely, what is philosophy, what is Jewish thought, and what is the relations between them both conceptually and politically or historical. Politically. So it affects also Levi Nas positions on actual politics. We still haven't really discussed that, but at a certain point it would be good. So this is my basic claim and indeed the way that I choose to show it is, among other things, the confrontation between the first major philosophical book, totality and infinity, and the second one that I already mentioned, otherwise than being so, to try to make it as concise and clear as possible. I would say the second book to stay for a moment with phenomenology, because, as I already said, it has two sides, the project, at least two sides, if not more philosophical and Jewish, but to stay with the philosophical phenomenological work. Once again, it's a book of phenomenology, Although it pushes the, I would say the limits of the genre explicitly, he also says, pushes the limits of the genre. It goes beyond acceptable phenological methodology, but nonetheless it belongs to philosophy, it belongs to phonology. It belongs, according to the characteristic that I already pointed out, namely the focus on some kind of a drama that concerns the constitution of the individual subject first and foremost through some kind of dynamics that concern, you know, the relations with the world and other people. And it remains an abstract story. It doesn't have a clear historical coordinates or political coordinates or clear relationship to events. It makes allusions to, but it's not the issue. So it's similar to the first book in this sense. And I read it similarly, namely, again as a code, as in coding. Nonetheless, what Levinas in other texts, the Jewish ones or the Talmudic ones, does spell out very explicitly about history, politics and contemporary events. Now, the main distinction between the two books is that the first book is about a relationship between totality and infinity. There is a. The title is End. It's a juxtaposition between totality and infinity that I already explained. And at the heart of the matter, namely the attempt of the. Of the emergence of an individual subject, stands a juxtaposition, stands a relationship between the subject and the other, the other, the face of the other person. That's the inaugural event, the revelation around which the entire drama revolves. This is the constitutive moment. And this is what has given the ndivid the name the philosopher of the other person or the ethics of the other person. So it's a book about relationship or relations in beyond, otherwise than being, there is no relationship. There is something different than being. It's. I would say, if there is any kind of relation, it's the beyond or otherwise, than it's something going beyond itself that there is no relationship to another thing over another person. And indeed the phenomenology of that book, the question is very similar, the constitution of the individual subject. But I would say the threat or the problem, the constitutive problem of the phenomenology of the second book is no longer how, from the totality of being, an individual existent. An individual being can emerge, an individual subject can emerge, namely, through ethical relations. It's no longer the big issue. The big issue in the second book is existence or being itself, even and especially as an individual being, namely, the result of the first book. The existence of an individual ethical subject becomes the problem for the first book. This is why I'm saying it's Levinas critically reflecting on his own project. The second book is dedicated to how an individual being, inasmuch as they are constituted ethically by their existence, by the fact that they are, are driven to perpetuate that being. There is something of Spinoza in it, on the Cornatus. So even if the constitution of the subject was ethical through the relationship with the other, the fact of existing means it needs to perpetuate, persevere in their being. Which means that the ethics that made it the subject possible becomes effaced. But the existence, but the very fact of being, of this subject, being itself is immoral in a sense. I'm pushing it, but not far, not so far from the Venus. This is more or less what he's saying. He speaks about the Latin being as esse, and as he talks about interese. So being is, you know, being for one's own interest. So it's an egoistic center, however you want to look at it. So it doesn't help us if in totality, infinity, we had at the end, an ethical subject, because this ethical subject will become, in its turn, the oppressor. So the second book needs to be more radical, needs to go beyond being, right, otherwise than being. That's the hope for it. A phenomenology of a subject that exists or that emerges not just in an exercise of stabilizing being, but in an exercise of going beyond one's being, in a sense undoing one's being. So the subject, the phenomenology of the subject in Autumn. Otherwise, a being is a subject who exists by undoing their own being, namely a certain act of sacrifice. That's a central term. Giving oneself is a central term otherwise than being. And this giving oneself, undoing oneself, in a sense, yes, It's a relationship to other people, but the other doesn't appear there even it's not relevant. The other is not irrelevant anymore. Otherness becomes a feature of the existence of the subject themselves that needs to alienate themselves from their own being all the time by self sacrificing. So There is an interiorization of otherness and the existence of the subject is basically an exit that is kind of a martyrdom, an ongoing martyrdom. It's less a question of being just, of creating a rational, just society. It's more about suffering, sacrificing oneself, undoing. One owns me. And this means that there is no relationship like in the first book. The other doesn't really play any role. The face of the other is not there. It's a much more self centered, paradoxically, drama of self sacrifice and exteriorization. What this means is that there is a certain to go back to the question of Western thought and Jewish thought. If the first book created some kind of a rational synthesis between the two Jewish thought ethics creates the ground on which you can build a rational world, which I call a philonic approach to the mediation between Greece or Athens and Jerusalem. The second book offers a different constellation altogether. It's a constellation that is built on a phenomenology that in a sense combines or fuses Greek thought and Jewish thought into one element that consists in this idea of self sacrifice. The subject never or does not have the vocation of ending this suffering or this martyrdom. In a sense it becomes its greatest mission. It is in a sense a much more religious thought that I called Paulinian. Paul created a different conversation between Athens, Jerusalem, Greek and Jewish thought that is precisely does not lead to the Greco Roman rationality of Philo, but leads indeed to a project that is a drama and creation of a subjectivity, subjectivity of faith or whatever you want to call it. So in a sense a subjectivity of

A

suffering and sacrifice in the Paulinian.

B

Precisely. So I think there is a lot of Paulinian Christian element in the second book that you don't find in the first book. So there is a fusion, a strong fusion of Jewishness and Greekness that in a sense as it was in history, creates something like a Christian formation that of course Levinas doesn't acknowledged as such. And it doesn't have also to be exactly acknowledged as such. It's Christological, it's not exactly Christian. But this is where the second book in a sense goes. Whatever it means, it means that the position of the Jewish element of thinking, be it, you know, Old Testament or New Testament, and I think it's much more New Testament, it's much more Paulinean, but it's nonetheless Jewish in the sense that it's built on this kind of transcendence and this kind of infinity, this kind of ethics becomes much more hostile to the project of the Greco Roman project of philosophy and being. It is much more, much less compromising, much less philonic in this sense, and creates a much stronger contradiction or war in a sense between ethics and ontology. Jewish thought beat, you know, Christologically articulated, but nonetheless Jewish thought vis a vis the Greco Roman project of the state of universal laws of Europe. And my point is that therefore the second book belongs to a moment in Levinas where he no longer believes and no longer works stories intellectually, but also politically towards a reconciliation or a reaffirmation of how Jewishness belongs to Europe, or in a sense even is the foundation of Europe, though it belongs to a period where Levinask is much more skeptical about the role and place of Jewishness in Europe. And to some extent he's going towards more and more alienation of Jewishness from Europe and an affirmation of a Jewish thought, culture and politics that is non European, that is outside of Europe, that is to some extent calls Europe into questions. And here comes the point of my entire exposition of saying what changed was 67, 68. This is. This is the care 6768 is the moment around which this transformation of the understanding of the relationship between Jewish Ms. Jews has radically changed.

A

So let's spell it out just a little bit more. So if the earlier work, the PRE67 work, imagines a kind of, say, just for the sake of the image of death, park Jew who makes his case for the role of Jews in Europe as part of a larger project of totality and infinity, what kind of Jew do we have? Or what is the state of Jews? And this is obviously a play of words that you use throughout the book. What is the state of the Jews after 67, 68? What are they to do? What is expected from them? What are they meant to produce? What is their project?

B

So thank you for reminding the title of the book State of Others, because it's going to be helpful here. So I already mentioned that one of my important interventions is saying, you know, you cannot just read the phenomenology, namely the ethics as standing in itself, but you have to see this connected to the Jewish writings, namely to politics and history, I mean concrete politics. The ethics of Levinas is deeply connected to his Jewish politics. And this is what I mean by state of Others. The other in Levinas is not only an ethical figure, it is also a political figure, a political figure that relates to thinking, not the political only, but more specifically the state. And there is a constellation where ethics and politics converge in the vinass for what I call the figure of the state of others, a state that is based on the ethics of the others that I think for him is the essence of the state of Israel in the sense of a Jewish state. And I think the entire telos of Lavellasian project goes towards this, in both its iterations, goes towards this figure, the state of others, namely the Jewish state, the ethical state. So there is in Levinas a telos that goes into the providing a philosophy and ethics for a Jewish state, namely, the project is closely related to a state of Israel. I'm not turning into Levinas. I don't want to turn him into a propaganda, you know, it's not like that it not be accurate or even true to describe him as such. He was not, you know, blindly following the state of Israel and finding philosophical way of justifying it. That's not, that's not that cynical. I think he really believed in a project of Jewish politics that in modernity, according to him, needs to take to be effective, take the shape of a state, and that this Jewish state indeed can live from Jewish intellectual tradition that according to him, has ethics in its center, namely it can become an ethical state. I think he believed in that, really. And he did think that this is the promise of the actual Jewish state, the state of Israel. And in this sense, yeah, there are similarities with Buber, for example, who also believed that Zionism, a certain version of Zionism, makes sense. And it is the version that for him would be precisely the realization of his own vision of. Of politics and ethics. So this is, I think, the telos, the real telos in Levinas. Now, as I said, this entire vision and entire reflection is built on trying to explain the relationship between Jews and modernity, or more specifically, Jews and European modernity, that for him is kind of epitomized by European philosophy, Western philosophy. So all the dynamics that I discussed so far lead to the question of the Jewish state, so the modern political form of giving effect to Jewish tradition of ethics. Now, in a sense, both in the earlier period and in the later period, he seems to remain convinced that the right vehicle for giving effect to Jewish tradition of ethics in politics is the Jewish state. What changes is his understanding of the role of this Jewish state and its position vis a vis the project of Europe originally, namely in the earlier version, before 6 7, 6, 8, since he believes Europe, the best version of Europe, draws from its Jewishness, from its basic ethical tradition, both as a subject and as a civilization. And therefore he believes that the Jewish state, the actual one, and the one that he hopes it to be to become is once again the best project of realizing Europe taking place outside of Europe in Palestine, the Middle East. But nonetheless it's the best version of this ethical state that he thinks that the combination of Jewish thought and Greek thought, Greco Roman thought leads to. In many ways, and I point it out, it means that earlier Levi Nas performs a kind of a colonial, much like bumble, a colonial operation of saying, you know, there is a group of people coming from Europe with European ideas or Judeo European ideas for the benefit of the entire world. And the best place that they found to realize it is outside of Europe in a place that nonetheless European powers made available for that project. Buber described it explicitly as colonialism, which he simply thought is different than capitalist, exploitative. He thought it's a similar story colonialism. But nonetheless he called the colonialism of almost doesn't acknowledge it this. There is a moment in 65 where he compares it to the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites from Egypt. And he actually does use the word conquest and colonial conquest and justifies it precisely by this idea of, you know, so this is before 67, 68. Now what is happening in 67, 68? You know, I use it in a schematic way to say the articulation of the Six Day War where Israel has become officially an occupying power, held territories officially as occupied territories. And at the same time Western discourse, especially in France around 68 or before that started to develop. The left and the right both develop anti colonial attitude. Decrying colonialism and imperialism and working towards decolonization has become official politics of France, Vietnam, Algeria. And what happened is that Israel the. The project of Israel from being aligned as a matter of fact with the project of the left. Because Jews are the victims of fascism and they want to build socialism, communism, the kibbutz from Jews being the allies of the left and so to speak the humanistic power of Europe suddenly found themselves as the enemies of the left insofar as they represented and were supporting the project of the Jewish state. That's created, I think, a deep break that goes beyond the Vinassa. In a sense. 67, 68 I think needs to be a concept that is at least as important as 45 in any attempt to understand contemporary Jewish thought. In the case of France, it's very obvious and I think also in the case of Levinas. And I think what is happening for Levinas is that he identifies these dynamics. He understands that the way he was talking before is no longer possible or is understood as imperialistic now differently than other thinkers also today that simply say, simply dismiss the colonial thought and the entire colonial history and simply affirm universalism and the justification of the fact that we represent Europeans or Jews represent. Universalism justifies more or less everything. Bernard Henri Levy would be the classic figure for that too. Also builds on Levinas. Alav, Ficklekraut, another Bernard was just in Haifa. He's a very, very active figure in justifying Israeli politics based on the fact that the Jews in Israel are the agents of European civilization, of universality in the Middle East. He has no qualms about that and claims to represent Levinas in that. I think Levinas did not take this strategy. I think Levinas understood the problem and entered into a process of self critique. I think this is what I'm describing in the book. He entered the process of self critique, which explains Levinas two the second Levinas and the Reconfiguration. And the reconfiguration, I suggest, is a move between a colonial to a decolonial discourse from an idea that Jews represent the best of Europe and therefore are justified in the conquest and colonization of Palestine. Secondly, Nas adopts a decolonial approach. He doesn't call it this way, but I claim that the new phenomenology, the new understanding of the subject is as a martyr, as a victim, represents in a sense also a decolonial terminology that I think nobody like Levinas took so far and so deeply. But in the political issue, he refashioned the Jewish project not as a European project, but as an anti European project. It's an anti colonial project. The Jews, the state of Israel is an emancipation from Europe and in this sense represent the avant garde of anti colonial and not of colonial forces. And this is why I call the book Levinas and Decolonial Israel because I think that was in a sense his legacy.

A

And this means that Jews are now encumbered upon, is encumbered upon the Jews. To pursue this project that could be titled beyond or otherwise from being in.

B

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's exactly this. It's the idea that the manifestation of the Jewish state qua ethical is not in its ability to enforce universal justice,

A

but in its ability to sustain itself.

B

Its inability to be a victim, inability to suffer, inability to be a martyr. That's, that's the main point, the point that Israel, the state of Israel is not the solution for the persecution of Jews. It is the continuation in the sense the constitution of a political entity that is based on being persecuted. The raison d' etre of the State of Israel is that it is being persecuted by anti Semitism, by anti Jewishness, by terror. And as long as it is persecuted as such, it in a sense testifies to its message, to its ethical message. And I think this is the deep, troubling element in Levinasa's legacy that translates, I think, quite clearly to what we see today in the actual events in Israel.

A

I have many questions, but maybe by way of including, let me ask you just this. What are you working on now?

B

I'm working mainly on two, two things. One of them is a new collaborative comparative project on contemporary political Jewish thought, such as the Vinass and contemporary Islamic political thought, trying to work, flesh out and work more some insights that I gained through the project and see how they correspond to similar development within Islamic thought. And I'm doing it with my good friend and colleague Anush Galjipur. And we recently launched an online forum that is called Alsman, a chronicle for Islamic Jewish Islamic agonistic thought gone from a struggling thought. And many of the ideas that we discussed are being kind of developed there. And I invite all the listeners to visit the sites and perhaps even to contribute to the site. This is one project, and the second project is indeed looking more closely on the site that in a sense I already point in the title of the book on Levinas. That is the main place where all this comes to reality, quite nightmarish one, which is the State of Israel, or more specifically Israel Palestine. And it's a project that tries to integrate into Jewish thought, or reread to some extent the contemporary Jewish thought as centered around the project of the State of Israel and introduce into this reflection and into this discourse Palestine, namely Palestinian thought. And in a sense declared that to my mind, any discussion, study, research today on Jewish thought, especially contemporary Jewish thought, must be in conversation with Palestine and with Palestinians.

A

Well, good luck with that. I hope we get to talk again soon about these issues and perhaps others. We were discussing State of Others Levinas and Decolonial Israel with Radla Pidotilad. Thank you so much.

B

Thank you, Emil. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com connect with us on Instagram and bluesky with the handle ew booksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork substack. Com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.