Duquesne University Press

Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas

1992, 1994

By Michaël de Saint Cheron

Translated by Gary D. Mole

$18.95  paper
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ISBN: 978-0-8207-0428-9

200 pages

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Book Information

An ardent admirer and student of Emmanuel Levinas during the last decade of the philosopher's life, Michaël de Saint Cheron sat down with his mentor for these interviews, conducted between 1992 and 1994. Throughout, their conversations provide further insight into the key concepts of responsibility, transcendence, holiness, and the hostage for understanding Levinas’s notion of ethics as first philosophy.

As Levinas and Saint Cheron discuss a variety of topics — death and time in the philosophies of Heidegger and Bergson, eros and the feminine, the Judeo-Christian dialogue, Levinas’s differences of thought with Paul Ricœur, reflections on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the “end of history” with the fall of Western Communism — we can clearly see Levinas’s ceaseless engagement with the justification for living after such horrors as those of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Stalinism, Cambodia, or Rwanda.

Included here as well, following the interviews, are several essays in which Saint Cheron presents his own further considerations of their conversations and Levinas’s ideas. He writes of the relation of the epiphany of the face to the idea of holiness; of Sartre and, in particular, that existentialist thinker’s “revision” of Jews and Judaism in his final controversial dialogues with Benny Lévy; of the epiphanies of death in André Malraux’s writings; and of the radical breach effected in the Western philosophical tradition by Levinas’s “otherwise-than-thinking." Finally, Saint Cheron pays homage to Levinas’s talmudic readings in an analysis of forgiveness and the unforgivable in Jewish tradition and liturgy, culminating in an inevitable confrontation with the Shoah from the perspective of Simon Wiesenthal’s harrowing The Sunflower and some of the contemporary reactions to it.

Author Information

MICHAËL dE SAINT CHERON is the author of numerous works touching on the relation between religion and literature. He has taught at the Elie Wiesel University Institute of Jewish Studies in Paris and the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and is the former president of the International Friends of André Malraux. The original French edition of this work, Entretiens avec Emmanuel Levinas, was published in 2006 and has been translated into several languages.

GARY D. MOLE is associate professor and former chair of the Department of French, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He is the translator of Emmanuel Levinas’s Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures and the author of Levinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement, Beyond the Limit-Experience: French Poetry of the Deportation, 1940–1945, and numerous studies of modern and contemporary French literature and thought.