Emmanuel Levinas, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
All philosophy is Greek — by which I mean that philosophical discourse, the conceptual apparatus, the demand for universalizability, the form of the argument are Greek inheritances, and there is no philosophy outside this inheritance for those who would speak philosophy. But Jewish testimony — the prophetic books, the Talmud, the long rabbinic tradition of textual reading — supplies what the Greek register, left to itself, occludes: the ethical fact of the call from the other person, the unsuppressed witness of the obligation that totality wants to absorb, the persistence of the singular face against the violence of the general concept.
The two registers cannot be collapsed into one another. The Talmudic reading is not philosophy by another name and philosophy is not a substitute for the Talmud. But the two can and must be translated into one another in the partial, never-completed work that any honest contemporary thinking requires. My own practice was to publish the Talmudic readings with the same secular Paris publishers (Éditions de Minuit, Vrin) that published my philosophical works, and to maintain the two authorships in parallel — the Quatre lectures talmudiques (1968) and Humanisme de l'autre homme (1972) in the same period; Beyond the Verse and Of God Who Comes to Mind in the same year (1982); In the Time of the Nations and Entre Nous in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The relation is the both-and that the writing performs more than it can theorize.12345
The relation with the other person is placed at the beginning! Moreover, Kant himself, in the statement of the second phrase of the categorical imperative, hastens towards this relation through a regular or irregular deduction from the universality of the maxim.Beyond the Verse - Talmudic Readings and Lectures, pp. 146–147
It will be readily understood that this science has a particular style that distinguishes it from philosophical discourse. A style that is in no way contingent in relation to its subject matter and truth, but a style that is entirely different from our methods of exposition. A whole lifetime is needed to master this science.Beyond the Verse - Talmudic Readings and Lectures, p. 117
And in Maimonides himself, to whom rational knowledge of God, metaphysical knowledge, is the supreme good of the human person (and, precisely, an inalienable good, exalting the self in its own happiness, a good that "profits yourself alone," in such a way that "no other shares the benefit with you" [Guide of the Perplexed, book III, chapter 54]), everything culminates in the formulation of the negative attributes.In the Time of the Nations, pp. 172–173
And the language of philosophy does not mean that an intellectual wind has torn the reader loose from all literalness, all particularity, all features that are "just so," and as such reduced to insignificance. What may have been wished for as holiness of life, in the Judaism of my native Lithuania, was not separated from the holiness of the Scriptures themselves.In the Time of the Nations, pp. 168–169
And there, between purely rational justice and injustice, there is an appeal to the 'wisdom' of the J, the possibilities of which perhaps don't include any principle that can be formulated a Priori. Violence of the Face You affirm that your way of naming God belongs strictly to philosophical discourse, and not to religion. To religion would belong the task of consolation, not of demonstration.Alterity and Transcendence, pp. 199–200
The question of how Jewish thought and philosophy relate is older than the medievals and not closer to settlement now. Hilary Putnam's Cambridge Companion chapter gives the analytic reading: my work makes a recognizably moral insight (the priority of the other) available to philosophical discourse, but the insight has its sources in a Jewish tradition that the philosophical reformulation does not exhaust. Catherine Chalier's chapter on the Talmud and her books on Kant-Levinas and on the soul give the most careful French-Jewish-philosophical reading. Susan Handelman's Fragments of Redemption locates me within the Jewish-modernist tradition of Benjamin and Scholem. Robert Gibbs reads me with Rosenzweig as a single late-modern Jewish-philosophical voice. The ENIO context — director from 1945 to 1980 of a school whose mission was to train teachers for the Alliance Israélite Universelle's Mediterranean network — shaped a vision of Judaism that I would defend with vigor: rationalist, anti-mystical, humanist, universalist; the Lithuanian Mitnagdic tradition rather than the Hasidic; Talmudic study rather than Kabbalistic speculation. Monsieur Chouchani, who lived in our apartment from 1947 to 1949 and from whom I learned Talmud with Aramaic, was the master from whom this Jewish-textual rationalism received its discipline. The cours de Rashi I gave on Saturdays at the ENIO from 1945 onward, and the Talmudic commentaries I delivered annually from 1960 at the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, were the public face of this practice. The two authorships are mine; I did not separate them in my life and I do not authorize separating them in the work.