Research:
The aim of my research is, on the one hand, to explore Levinas' conception of politics as “the finite time of the state” and, on the other, to analyse the political aspect of “religion” in Levinas' sense, which is “sociality” and “time”. If interpreters, following Derrida's exegesis of Levinas' work, recognise the spurious nature of “ethics” in Levinasian terms, which is neither ethics nor anti-politics, it remains to be investigated whether the philosopher's claim not to identify his concept of “religion”, used as a synonym for “ethics” and “first philosophy”, with a specific religion. The research will be structured in three parts: starting from the unpublished manuscripts, we will further explore the extent to which the writing of Totalité et Infini, in particular the section Au-delà du visage, depends on Franz Rosenzweig's work Der Stern der Erlösung, in which Jewish community life and the Christian mission are presented as the two concrete historical forms, the only ones possible, of overcoming totalising philosophy in “real life”; a critique of historiography as “idolatry of the fait accompli”, uninterested in re-actualising what has failed to be, will be reconstructed in Levinas's overall work, starting from his early analyses of the trace of the Other, i.e. the written works, those “appropriated by the survivors”; Finally, the relationship between science and revolution, between study and politics, will be explored, starting from the concepts of “dwelling” and “extra-territoriality”, which appear both in philosophical works and in Talmudic readings. The main focus of our inquiry is Levinas' preference for the Babylonian Talmud commentary, which is a religious practice of Judaism, in order to address political issues philosophically.
Keywords:
Levinas; Rosenzweig; revelation; German idealism; politics; religion; history; revolution; Talmud