#  Video: Emmanuel Levinas and Decolonial Jewish Thought 

 





April 17, 2025

 

 

 

This talk explored the relations between post-Holocaust Jewish thought and decolonial thought through the work of French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Elad Lapidot offered an innovative presentation of Levinas’s entire intellectual project.

Speaker: Elad Lapidot is Professor for Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. Holding a PhD in philosophy from the Paris Sorbonne university, he has taught philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud at many universities, such as the University of Bern, Switzerland, and the Humboldt Universität and Freie Univeristät in Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics.

This event took place on April 17, 2025.



 



 

 

 



 

 

 

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ANNOUNCER: Harvard Divinity School.

SHAUL MAGID: "Emmanuel Levinas and Decolonial Jewish Thought," April 17, 2025.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. It is indeed my pleasure to introduce our speaker, Elad Lapidot, who is a friend and colleague, and we've worked together on a number of projects that we're still working on.

He's a professor of Jewish thought at the University of Lille in France and lives in Berlin. In Europe, you can do that, I guess. He's currently a visiting professor at Dartmouth College. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne. He has taught philosophy, Jewish thought, and Talmud at many universities, such as the University of Bern, Switzerland and Humboldt University and the Freie Universität in Berlin as well.

His work is guided by questions concerning the relationship between knowledge and politics. Among his many publications are most recently Politics of Not Speaking, which I think just came out. Am I right-- just came out? And Jews Out of the Question-- A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism, which I really-- I have not yet read The Politics of Not Speaking, but I certainly read Jews Out of the Question, which people should really read. It's a fascinating and important book.

And today he's going to speak about his upcoming book, which will be published in August, called The State of Others-- Levinas and Decolonial Israel. And Elad has written extensively on Levinas, and this is a really interesting study on Levinas and the political in ways that-- because I did read the book prepublication, but in ways that people have not really addressed before. So Professor Lapidot.

ELAD LAPIDOT: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Shaul, for the invitation and the introduction. Thank you for the program of Jewish studies-- the entire staff for supporting and organizing this event. I'm very happy to be here at Harvard, especially this week when spring is coming out. It's very beautiful.

And it's a privilege to be talking to you about this project that I've been invested in for some years and finally is coming out-- as Shaul mentioned in coming August, which I called State of Other-- Levinas and Decolonial Israel. So I'm going to walk you through some basic thoughts that are guiding this book, this project, and hopefully it would make sense, and I'll be happy to discuss it with you after the presentation.

So I'm going to start by a certain paradox or a certain riddle or even a certain difficulty in the entire Levinasian project. So for those of you who don't know so much about Levinas, he's a French Jewish philosopher, lived throughout the 20th century, 1905 to 1995, and so lived through all the big events of the century.

Was a student of Martin Heidegger, and then became one of the most important philosophers, period, in the 20th century. Considered to be one of the great contemporary philosophers and, at the same time, one of the important contemporary Jewish thinkers-- influenced many other, both in Jewish thought and in philosophy.

And you could say that there are two main motifs going through his project. The first one is more well known. So as a philosopher, he criticized what he understood to be the tendency of philosophy to focus on the question of being, what in philosophy is called ontology, the science of being. And he says that's focusing too much on abstract, systematic thought and leaves out what he thought should be more important than this is ethics.

So against ontology, the science of being, the speaking about being, he said we should actually speak up more about ethics, specifically the ethics of the other person, the responsibility of the other person. So that, you could say, is a major issue in his philosophy. He's known as the philosopher of the other person. The "other" is a word associated with Levinas. So that's the first thing that he's doing throughout he's known for-- the ethics of the other against ontology.

A second thing that he has been doing, which is less understood, but is very central to what he was doing-- he identified this talking about being as a central thing that characterizes the entire tradition of Western philosophy. So he criticized or took a distance for what he called Western philosophy. And against Western philosophy, he offered we should look at a different tradition of thinking Judaism or Jewish thought.

So there are two projects that run parallel to one another-- a more conceptual one, ethics of the other against ontology, and the other one, Jewish thought against philosophy. Now, if you look at both these projects together, you could see that ethics of responsibility is on the side of Jewish thought. So indeed, one of his points was that Jewish thought is a tradition that is not built on ontology, on thinking the being, but is a tradition that is built on ethics.

So Jewish thought is a tradition of ethics, while Western philosophy is tradition of ontology. Now, what comes out of this is that Jewish thought is a certain other of Western philosophy. It's a certain other because it thinks about the ethics of the other.

It's an ethical thinking of the other, which is itself, therefore, an other of Western tradition, which means that, in a sense, if you look at these two motifs together, means that to some extent, Jews are the others of the West. Now, if this is true, we find ourselves asking the question if, according to Levinas, being responsible for the other means being responsible for Jews.

Now, I want to walk with you through certain critiques that have been voiced in the last two decades concerning Levinas that try to schematize this paradox of this issue in Levinas. So there are three main, you could say, ways that Levinas has been criticized about his identification of specifically Jewish thought as a tradition of ethical thinking against Western thought that is ontological.

So there is a universalist strand that is associated by people like Judith Butler and Sarah Hammerschlag. They were saying that by saying the Jews are specifically more ethical than the others, Levinas was highlighting certain Jewish particularism against a more universalist way of thinking, so he was undermining universalism.

And they said that politically, it manifested itself in Levinas's support of the Jewish nation-state that is oppressive against the others of the Israeli nation-state, namely Palestinians. So they were saying, if you want to follow Levinas and really be ethical, we need to universalize his thought, which means de-Judaize it. It's not specifically Jewish to be ethical. That's their point.

Second strand of critique I call the postcolonial one, represented by people like Fred Moten or John Drabinski. They were saying something almost opposite. They're saying, no, no, no. Don't universalize too quickly, because we have a bad experience with Judeo-Christian attempt to be universal.

Specifically, this tradition that says we are universal undermined particular other cultures. And this politically manifest itself in the great project of European colonialism that oppressed non-European cultures. So they were saying, no, if you want to follow Levinas and be ethical, we need to decolonize him, which means, again, de-Judaizing him. It's not Judeo-Christian. It should be something else.

Third strand of critique against Levinas I call Jewish postcolonial. The major representatives are Samuel Moyn and Leora Batnitzky. There are also others. And they were saying, the postcolonial critique is right. There is a problem with Judeo-Christian universalism that undermines particular cultures.

But the first victims of this is Judeo-Christian colonialism that oppressed non-Christian Judaism. The Jews were the first victims of Judeo-Christian colonialism, so this imperialism of Christianity undermines the particularism of the Jews. And when Levinas goes with the European Judeo-Christian thought, he is undermining first and foremost Jewish thought. So they say, to decolonize Levinas, we need to re-Judaize. Him.

So I have shown you three ways of criticizing Levinas, and these are major scholars of Levinas over the last two decades. And now I'm coming to what I have to say about all that. What I have to say about all that is that after having read Levinas intensively, I came to the conclusion that what is considered to be a novel postcolonial critique of the last two decades is actually something that Levinas himself, during his lifetime, in a very crucial moment of his lifetime, actually realized.

He anticipated the postcolonial criticism of his thought in the '60s, and my claim is that he reshaped his entire project based on decolonial and postcolonial thought of the '60s. So what I am saying-- Levinas had a decolonial turn in the '60s, in the late '60s, that created something that I call decolonial Jewish thought.

And the book that is coming in August is where I'm trying to explain this decolonial turn, what it is all about, how it affected his philosophy and how it affected the Jewish thought, and how it's affected his thinking about politics-- more specifically, the state of Israel. State of Others-- Levinas and Decolonial Israel-- so I'm going to tell you now a little more what I'm doing in the book.

So the first thing that I'm doing in the book-- I'm intervening on how at all we read Levinas. Levinas wrote a lot of things, a lot of texts. And usually, you could say he wrote three different genres of texts.

The first genre of texts that he wrote are philosophical texts. More specifically, he was working in a tradition of phenomenology. It's not important now what it means, but it's a major strand of European 20th century philosophy. So he has texts that we call philosophical phenomenological texts. That's the first kind of text that he was writing.

The second kind of text that he was writing is what is called Jewish essays. He wrote small texts. Usually he published them in different community journals in France and then put them together in collections. The most famous one is Difficile liberté. That was translated as Difficult Freedom. And this is small essays that usually intervene on different questions of the hour. That's the second genre of texts.

And the third genre of text are the Talmudic readings. He gave-- every year, there was a meeting of French and Jewish intellectuals. Every year, they had a conference about some issue-- war, revolution, forgiveness. And Levinas would give a Talmudic reading. He would pick a Talmudic passage, think, fit the occasion, and would give two hours' reading. And then he collected all these readings, and there were four or five collections of Talmudic readings.

So there are three different kinds of texts that Levinas has published. And these three different kind of texts are mostly read separately. Namely, people who are interested in philosophy of Levinas don't bother reading the Jewish essays, bother even less reading the Talmudic readings. People who are interested in the Jewish Levinas and Jewish thought don't really bother reading the phenomenology. And so we have different corpus, different bodies of texts of Levinas, that nobody or hardly anyone reads together.

So what I'm doing-- I'm saying no, that's a problem. In order to understand the project of Levinas, you have to see that these three different kind of texts, these three bodies of the work of Levinas, should be read together, are inseparable from one another, and that the entire project of Levinas is precisely the confrontation between philosophy and Jewish thought that, for him, is especially Talmudic.

So he, in a sense, stages two different tradition of thought-- Western philosophy and Jewish Talmudic readings, talks about them, indeed, in different publications. But they are not separable, because the confrontation is precisely at the heart of his thinking.

So what I'm saying-- at the heart of Levinas's thinking is to stage Jewish thought, Talmudic thought, as an other tradition of thinking-- the other of Western philosophy. And I call it inter-epistemic conflict. "Episteme" is a technical word to say a tradition of thought, a tradition of knowledge, and Levinas stages a conflict between different worlds of knowledge. So that's the first thing that I say. I say this is at the heart of the project.

The second thing that I do in the book-- I say the thinking of Levinas-- his thought has a history. As I said, the history of the thinking of Levinas is basically the 20th century that we all know as a history.

Commonly, very often or almost always when you will read people writing on Levinas, there is no history. People read him as if there is just a system of ideas that was reformulated, maybe radicalized from earlier books to later books. But basically, there is a philosophy of Levinas.

I say no, there are actually two very clear historical phases of the entire project of the philosophy of Levinas, and earlier and later Levinas. And I say that I can even give quite precise date where there is a turn, and the turn is around the year '67, '68. And these are not just numbers. I call it '67 after '68.

And what I mean about that is that '67, as you will understand, is the Six-Day War. And it has already been trivial to say that the Six-Day War has created a huge effect on everybody that was thinking Jewishly in any way. Less taken into consideration is that '67 was very close to '68, and '68 is a year that symbolizes something that has not only happened in '68, but during the '60s. And this is a huge transformation not only in how people thinks Jewish issues, but how people think in the West in more general.

One of the important things that happened in the '60s is the decolonial era-- that the entire West and Europe has taken distance from its colonies, and people became aware of what we call colonial history and the need to undo that-- to do decolonization. In France, it was very important. Vietnam, the French Vietnam, the Algerian War-- all important events during the late '50s and the '60s that shaped a new kind of discourse.

And what is important is not, therefore, only '67, the Six-Day War. It is important that the Six-Day War has been read and interpreted in light of a new discourse, the discourse of '68-- an anti-colonial, decolonial discourse. So this is why I'm calling this moment '67 after '68. And I'm saying this was a moment that changed not only the thought of Levinas. I think it had a wider effect, especially in France, but I'm focusing on Levinas.

Now, if you look at the different work of Levinas, you will see that you can actually distinguish between his earlier philosophy-- that the big book of philosophy was published in '61, before '68. The first volume of Jewish essays was published in '63.

The later philosophy book was published in '74, but he started writing it in '68. And the second edition of the Jewish essays were published in '73. And in the middle, in '68, you have the first volume of Talmudic reading that is published in '68. So '68 and '67 are a moment of transfer in Levinas' thinking, and what I say-- he was moving between colonial way of thinking to decolonial way of thinking.

Now, I'm going to explain now quickly what I mean by colonial and decolonial ways of thinking. So I'm going to start by Levinas before '67, '68. Once again, I'm going to tell you what's happening in his philosophy and what's happening in Jewish thought, because these two run parallel and conflict and conflate in his thought.

So in his philosophy, if you look in his early philosophy before '67, '68, as I told you, he is insisting on ethics, an ethics against ontology. However, in his early philosophy, ethics is understood as being the foundation of existence, foundation of being.

Namely, ethical existence creates happy, joyful kind of human being. The ethical subject is a joyful subject in the world, is a rational subject, and it's a generous subject that is hospitable to others and is a subject of justice. So ethics grounds, so to speak, healthy, happy, generous kind of being. That's his philosophy. And I'm, of course, simplifying it. I just want to let you understand where it's going.

That's the earlier philosophy of Levinas. The earlier Jewish thought of Levinas-- as I told you, he puts Jewish thought against Western philosophy. However, in his earlier thought-- what he's doing-- he says Jewish thought, namely the tradition of thought that thinks ethics, precisely of ethics grounds being, is the foundation of being. Jewish thought is the real foundation of Western philosophy. The real origin, so to speak-- the real model of Western thought is Jewish thought.

Politically, it translates in his early period to looking at Jews, namely Israel-- Israel before the state, Israel as the collective of the Jews-- as some kind of a model, some kind of a forerunner or a model for Europe. So to speak, Europe should learn from the Jewish people, learn from the Jewish Israel, how it should shape itself.

More politically-- and this is interesting. After the beginning of the '50s, he more and more started to see the state of Israel as, in a sense, an avant garde of how Europe should become. Israel is an avant garde outside of Europe, in the Middle East, that is there to create a certain utopia, a certain just society, that should be the model for Europe. I call that colonial Zionism.

Now, Levinas is not the only one who had this thought. It was a vision that you can also find in Buber. You can find it in other thinkers. Not all Zionists had this idea-- a messianic idea of the state of Israel. Levinas definitely had it.

And I brought to you a little passage from a Talmudic reading from '65. "Promised Land, Permitted Land" is a Talmudic reading. It was a year that they were talking about war. And Levinas was reading a passage of the Talmud that is basically an interpretation, a reading, Talmudic reading of the book of Joshua and the conquest of the promised land.

More specifically-- no, so it's not about the book of Joshua. It's before the book of Joshua-- is the issue-- is the moment with the spies. Moses is sending spies to tour the land, and they're coming back and say, no, there is a problem with this project of the promised land. And Levinas is reading this passage. And I'm going to read to you one thing that he's saying. He's saying, "You will say that everyone can imagine that he's founding just society, and that he's sacralizing the Earth."

He's talking about the whole project of conquering the land of Canaan. Is it not a colonial project? So everybody can say they are doing in the name of God and then conquering another land. "And will that encourage conquerors and colonialists," that the book of Joshua, or the whole project of the promised land is a colonial project?

And Levinas says, "But here one must answer"-- there is an answer to that-- "the first teaching of Judaism is the following. A moral teaching exists, and certain things are more just than others. A society in which man is not exploited, a society in which men are equal, a society such as the first founders of kibbutzes wanted it." It's not just a reading of the Bible. "And it is in the name of this universal justice and not in the name of some national justice or other that the Israelites"-- and you can read here "Israelis"-- "lay claim to the land of Israel."

"Those who are about to conquer a country the way heaven is conquered"-- for justice-- "those who ascend"-- do aliyah-- "are already beyond delicate tears"-- are beyond this accusation of being colonialist, because Israel, the Israelites of the Bible and the Israel of today-- they are a project of justice.

And this is why it's OK that they conquer the land. That's what I call colonial Zionism. They are there to bring justice to the region and to humanity. This is why it's OK. That's the basic gist of, I think, what I call colonial Zionism that you find in Levinas in these years.

Now I want to jump to the second period of Levinas after '67, '68. And I claim, as I told you, there is a shift. So I'm going to walk through you quickly the shift. On the level of philosophy, ethics is no longer the basis, the foundation for being. Being ethical does not ground the happy, solid kind of being.

In Levinas's later philosophy, being ethical is considered to be for him contradicting, being in a sense in conflict with being. It's against being. It's something other than being. This is how his second book is called, Autrement qu'être-- Otherwise Than Being-- which means we are now talking about the ethical existence that is not happy and joyful and generous.

But the model of ethical existence is now described as a sacrificial-- self-sacrifice. It's a suffering. The ethical subject is a victim, in a sense, an innocent victim. So now we are in a different kind of conceptuality. Some commentators, including myself, have spotted a certain Christianization in the terminology of Levinas.

This is what happened in his philosophy. Now, what happens in his Jewish thought? Jewish thought, precisely like ethics, is now not just the foundation of Western philosophy. It's now in conflict with Western philosophy. Jews or Israel is no longer the model of Europe, but is now schematized by Levinas as the victim of Europe.

The state of Israel once again is no longer the avant garde of European civilization, but is now understood to be the resistance to Europe, the refuge of Jews as the victims of Europe. And in these years, the discourse about the memory of the Holocaust becomes more and more strong.

This leads Levinas to what I call a decolonial version of Zionism. So the state of Israel, the Zionist project, is no longer there to create a just society that will be the light to the nations, but something else is being formulated. And I am again bringing you a passage.

Few years later-- now we're at '69, so a year after '68-- the Jewish intellectuals that year in Paris met, and they dedicated their meeting to the issue of revolution. It was a meeting about '68. And the title for this year's conference was "Judaism and Revolution." And Levinas-- this is how he called his Talmudic reading. And he brought a Talmudic reading through which he spoke about revolution.

And at a certain moment, he quoted a good friend of his, Maurice Blanchot, a non-Jewish French writer that wrote to him a letter. Blanchot was aligned with the '68 students, with the revolutionary decolonial students. But at a certain moment, Blanchot felt uncomfortable with the discourse of these students, and he wrote a letter to Levinas describing it. And Levinas shares with the audience his letter, and I'm reading for you from the letter that Levinas read from Blanchot. This is Blanchot now writing to Levinas.

"I ask myself why these young people operated on thoughtlessness, on the usage of empty concepts-- imperialism, colonialism"-- that's the new discourse, anti-colonial discourse-- "and also on the feeling that it is the Palestinians who are the weakest, and one must be on the side of the weak," in parentheses, "as if Israel were not extremely, dreadfully vulnerable." And Levinas adds, "The two Israels, Mr. Israel, namely the Jewish people, and the state of Israel, for Israel is vulnerability itself."

What I detect here-- and I show in the book how, of course, it's a bigger discourse. Here, it's just the bud, is a different kind of understanding the project of the state of Israel. It's no longer a happy, strong, ethical subject that creates a just society. It's now a weak subject. It's a victimized people, a victimized state that fights for its survival. Namely, it's not the just. It's the weak.

I call it not the messianism of David-- King David. It's the messianism of-- Levinas talks about it-- of Isaiah, the chapters of Isaiah that speak about the suffering messiah. So it's not the king. It's the victim messiah. This is a new kind of discourse for Levinas. And I in the book try to show in what way it is an adaptation of the decolonial discourse, the new anticolonial discourse, to the Jewish case and to Zionism.

Now, I want to finish it, my presentation, and open the discussion to your question by pointing out what it meant-- this twist, this turning Levinas-- what it meant to his concrete views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So I want to say-- the last thing I want to say is something about Levinas and the Palestinians.

There is a big debate about Levinas and the Palestinians that has already been rehearsed a few times. The central element of the entire debate is an interview that Levinas gave on a French radio, the Jewish French radio, on September 28, 1982, 10 days after the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

At a certain moment, the interviewer, Salomon Malka, an important figure in the Jewish community in France, asks Levinas, "Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher of the other. In history, is politics not the very place where the other is encountered? Is the other for the Israel not, first and foremost, the Palestinian?" Question 10 days after Sabra and Shatila.

Levinas answers, "My definition of the other is completely different. The other is one's neighbor. And in that sense, being for the other means you are for your neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or is unfair to them, what can you do? In that case, other takes on a different character. In otherness, an enemy can appear."

Now, what exactly he meant by that is debated. It's not the easiest passage. Everybody, however, is clear that he did not accept Shlomo Malka's proposition that the Palestinians are the other of the Israeli, but he insists to say there is an enemy here.

So the most well-known comment on that response is Judith Butler, that read it as if Levinas is saying-- she says he was stating in this interview that the Palestinians had no face. "Had no face," in Levinas' jargon, means they are not an other. They do not deserve responsibility to the other person, because the responsibility to the other person is only for the face of the other. And if Palestinians have no face, they are not other. They don't deserve responsibility. So it's a very strong word where Judith Butler said, for him, the Palestinians are excluded from the ethics of the other.

\[INAUDIBLE\] criticized Butler and says, this is completely untrue. It's unfair. It's betraying Levinas. I think Judith Butler had a point. What I am showing in my book is that there are actually two phases in Levinas's view on the Palestinians-- again, before and after '67, '68.

In '67-- before '67 and '68, there is, as I said, a colonial discourse. The state of Israel brings Western, namely, universal, justice to the Middle East. And so the Palestinians-- at that phase, he calls them Arabs, not Palestinians-- represent the link to the land and imminent being, ontological being without ethical transcendence, something like the paganism of the Canaanites in the book that we just read, and even, in a certain sense, a proximity to Hitlerism-- how Levinas understood Hitlerism. And so, in a sense, before '67 and '68, it's paganism that is being fought by the Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism. That's before '67 and '68.

What happened after '67, '68 is very interesting. It changes the entire story. Now there is a decolonial discourse where the state of Israel is the shelter, as I said, of the Jewish victims of Western imperialism, as he called the passion of the Holocaust-- again, the use of Christian terminology of the passion. Now we're in Easter. It's very timely.

The Palestinians, in his later discourse, now change role. Now they represent imperialism and the aspiration to conquer territory which is not pagan. Rather, it's a Western. It's a principle of the West itself. So the Palestinians after '67 and '68 represent Western imperialism, and Jews represent the victims and, of course, the resistance to that, both in Europe and in the Middle East. This is what you will find in these texts. And this is, so to speak, the most, I think, concrete translation of what I call colonial and decolonial Zionism on Levinas's view on the conflict.

Now, this is where I'm going to end. I would like to open discussion. I will just tell you that I am speaking about Levinas. I think Levinas lays the foundation for something else that is going to develop in the years after.

There is an entire-- I was talking with \[? Yishai. ?\] There was an entire tradition of French Jewish thinkers that basically were thinking with Levinas and from Levinas and developed more and more after '67 and '68 a kind of thinking that I call decolonial Zionism, both in France, and many of them moved to Israel, went to Israel, did aliyah, and I think continued this discourse there.

And my hypothesis-- it's something that I need to study still-- is that they really affected also how Zionism or the state of Israel is being thought of in Israel itself. But this is something that, as I said, I'm just throwing to you as an hypothesis. Thank you very much for your attention, and I'm very happy to hear what you think.

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SHAUL MAGID: Sponsors-- Harvard Divinity School, Harry Edison Fund Center for Jewish Studies.

ANNOUNCER: Copyright 2025, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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The views and opinions expressed by the speakers in this video are solely those of the individuals and do not reflect the official position or policies of HDS or Harvard University.



 

 



 

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