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Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and two extremely provocative thinkers whose reputations have grown considerably, are rarely studied together. This is due to the disparate interests of many of their intellectual heirs. Strauss has influenced political theorists and policy makers on the right while Levinas has been championed in the humanities by different cadres associated with postmodernist thought. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, Leora Batnitzky brings together these two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that they often had the same philosophical sources and their projects had many formal parallels. While such a comparison is valuable in itself for better understanding each figure, it also raises profound questions in the debate on the definitions of 'religion', suggestingways that religion makes claims on both philosophy and politics. ... Read more

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Is faith in revelation reasonable?Yes!
This is a masterful work!The author not only enables us to understand the depths of the many works of Strauss and Levinas covering many decades, she also places us in touch with others who for more than two millennia have concerned themselves with the volatile relationships between the "truths" of philosophy and revelation, also doing the same with subsequent scholarship on the contributions and limitations of the thought of Strauss and Levinas.

Although the subtitle implies that philosophy plays a crucial role in our understanding of the dynamics of the relationship between religion and politics, from this text the reader will readily realize that history plays an even more dynamic role in this relationship. Having in mind the centrality of reason in philosophical discourse, this reader has an appreciation of a similarity between this reason and history, that while both are vitally necessary to our thought, neither is sufficient. Thus a role for a revelation that is at once historic and transcendent, a revelation that is reasonable, not susceptible to a reductive rationality.

While the author writes very clearly about the limits of historicism and for truth that is transhistorical, it seems to this reader that the notion of reason being discussed is that of an outdated faculty psychology.If we note that in the human species, evolution has become conscious of itself, and that we cultivate this consciousness, it seems reason is limited by the scant number of the varibles that impinge upon our daily lives for which we have the capacity to bring into conscious awareness, reason also limited by its temptation to rationalize our thoughts.These limitations provides space and time for revelation to play a role in our lives, leaving us with a faith that is reasonable.

The revelation that is at the center of this study is a Judaic notion of "law."Given my interest, as well as that of the author, in the larger context in which law is a text, I will utilize an often repeated phrase of her, to simply note that more is beyond the scope of this review.

I began to read this study because of my interest in Levinas and his appreciation of the otherness of others, sharing with the author an acute awareness that, while our receptivity to this otherness is a much needed corrective to a corrosive notion of rational autonomy, this receptivity is insufficiently political. Of Polish ancestry who twenty years ago led a study abroad semester contingent to Krakow, I became more acutely aware of how in 1945 the moment of liberation from Nazism became the moment of enslavement to Communism.In dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust and the emergence of Israel as a nation state, I share with the author some apprehension at the difficulty of our seeing in the Palestinian, the otherness of the other.

It is at this point that I also share with the author her appreciation of the awesome contribution of Leo Strauss to philosophy and the politics of revelation (pages 209-10):"On the one hand, Strauss did view the human predicament as tragic in that there will never be, according to him, the 'full reconciliation among fellow citizens.' Yet Strauss was not an advocate of tragic resignation but rather of dispelling what he took to be human fantasy ... that we fool ourselves, to our own detriment, by blindly believing our own pieties..."

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Reviews the potentially complementary albeit sharp differences between two important contemporary Jewish philosophers. ... Read more

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French philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) is best known for his two major, highly original works on ethics, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974).Among his lesser known works is a short but remarkable essay published in 1934, "Refections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism," in which he considers German conservatism and the Nazi movement, and reflects on Western philosophy’s capacity to insure itself against ‘elemental evil.’ Difficult Justice uses this essay as an introduction to a collection of papers on Levinas’s ethical and political thought.

In this volume editors Asher and Gad Horowitz bring together contributors from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to explore how Levinas’s work relates to a broad range of contemporary philosophical and political questions.In particular, they examine Levinas’s challenge to liberalism ‘to find another kinship for man … absolutely opposed to oppression,’ and his movement beyond liberalism to embrace ‘the claim of the Other.’This thought-provoking collection will not only be invaluable to Levinas scholars, it will also be of interest to those working in the areas of Jewish studies, women’s studies, and political theory.

Contributors:
Keith Anderson
Shannon Bell
Robert Bernasconi
Mielle Chandler
Tina Chanter
Marinos Diamantides
Rosalyn Diprose
Enrique Dussel
Oona Eisenstadt
Robert Gibbs
Asher Horowitz
Gad Horowitz
Ze’ev Levy
Joseph Rosen
Brian Schroeder
Victoria Tahmasebi

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We are exorbitant, and rightly so, when we cut any link we may have to cosmological powers. Levinas invites us to be exorbitant by distancing ourselves from visions of metaphysics, epistemology, and theology. We begin to listen well to Levinas when we hear him inviting us to break completely with the pagan world in which the gods are simply the highest beings in the cosmos and learn to practice an adult religion in which God is outside cosmology and ontology. God comes to mind neither in our attempts to think him as the creator of the cosmos nor in moments of ecstasy but in acts of genuine holiness, such as sharing a piece of bread with someone in a time of desperate need. Levinas, in short, enjoins us to be exorbitant in our dealings with one another. This book asks how the "between" of Levinas's thinking facilitates a dialogue between Jews and Christians. In one sense, Levinas stands exactly between Jews and Christians: ethics, as he conceives it, is a space in which religious traditions can meet. At the same time, his position seems profoundly ambivalent. No one can read a page of his writings without hearing a Jewish voice as well a a philosophical one. Yet his talk of substitution seems to resonate with Christological themes. On occasion, Levinas himself sharply distinguishes Judaism from Christianity--but to what extent can his thinking become the basis for a dialogue between Christians and Jews? This book, with a stellar cast of contributors, explores these questions, thereby providing a snapshot of the current state of Jewish-Christian dialogue. ... Read more

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This book explores Levinas's rethinking of the meaning of ethics, justice and the human from a position that affirms but goes beyond the anti-humanist philosophy of the twentieth century ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Carefully Written and Insightful
Elisabeth L. Thomas' book traces the connection between ethics, justice and being throughout the development of Levinas' thought.In the preface, Thomas announces that for Levinas "it is not a matter of leaving being, but rather of how being remains susceptible to the ethical saying" (p. 9).Her book, in other words, examines the place of ontology within Levinas' ethics.

The thing I like most about this book is how Thomas takes pains to show how Levinas' early works from the 1930s and 1940s remain relevant for his later thought.That is, Thomas does not dismiss Levinas' early reflections on the ontological difference and the "there is" as simply "early works", but argues that these themes have an important role to play in Levinas' ethics even during the time of Otherwise Than Being in 1974.Many commentators have also insisted on the importance of Levinas' early works, but from what I can see Thomas is the first one to carefully work out these details, and for this reason this book should be on the shelf of anyone with a serious interest in Levinas' thought.

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"This book examines the implication of Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy of ethics for the theory, criticism, and practice of human communication." ... Read more

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Study of one of the key philosophers in the post-Heideggerian field and an increasingly central presence in contemporary debates about identity and responsibility. ... Read more

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The Face of the Other and the Trace of God contain essays on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and how his philosophy intersects with that of other philosophers, particularly Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Derrida. This collection is broadly divided into two parts: relations with the other, and the questions of God. ... Read more