The Third Wave of Levinas Scholarship

Today Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy enjoys unprecedented popularity. During the recent (2006) centennial celebrations, a staggering thirty-two conferences were held in thirteen countries over fi ve continents honoring Levinas’s work. But Levinas’s infl uence extends far beyond the academy. His ethics of the face, the contours of which were shaped by both his Jewish heritage and his early training in phenomenology under Husserl and Heidegger, has served as an inspiration for religious leaders, writers, dissidents, statesmen, and artists the world over. Pope John Paul II, giving a private account of his thoughts and beliefs in his 1994 book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, spoke of how “the human face and the commandment ‘Do not kill ’ are ingeniously joined in Lévinas, and thus become a testimony for our age.”1 Writer, dramatist, and fi rst president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, was able to fi nd in Levinas’s work succor during his (Havel’s) many years of imprisonment for his involvement in the Czechoslovak human rights movement (VONS).2 Rubens Ricupero, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, reaffi rming in 2000 UNCTAD’s commitment to the ethical and human dimensions of development that would lift the world’s masses out of poverty, gave a lecture in which he invoked the name of Emmanuel Levinas, in particular his claim that democracies around the world have suffered a heavy loss by the demise of socialism and the utopian vision.3 The avant-garde French fi lmmaker Jean-Luc Godard too has increasingly drawn on Levinas’s work. One of the characters in the movie Notre Musique (2004), for example, which deals with the themes of violence, morality, colonialism, and the current Israel-Palestine confl ict, visits Mostar’s Stari Most (Old Bridge), a four-centuries-old symbol of ethnic division, and reads from Levinas’s book Entre Nous.4