Jean-Paul Sartre: Heidegger Made Kosher

In Levinas's case the difficulties were compounded by the hazards of biography. In many respects, his philosophy of "Otherness" reflects his own distinctive itinerary as a perennial outsider. As a youth, Levinas was displaced from his native Kovno by the upheavals surrounding World War I. His family relocated to Ukraine, where Levinas attended high school. But the Bolshevik Revolution, and the civil war that followed, made it impossible to remain. The Levinas family returned to a newly independent Lithuania, where they hoped at last to find tranquillity. But Lithuanian nationalism had set in, making things uncomfortable for Russian speakers like the Levinases. Thus, in 1923 the family moved again, this time to Strasbourg, the French city geographically closest to Kovno.

In 1923 Levinas enrolled at the University of Strasbourg; he completed a dissertation on Husserl in 1930. But instead of pursuing a university career, as his mentors had urged in view of his prodigious philosophical talents, he took a post with the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an organization charged with acculturating Eastern European Jews and defending Jewish minorities. During the late 1930s Levinas joined the French army. In 1940 his unit was captured during France's ignominious "strange defeat" at the hands of the German Wehrmacht. It was Levinas's misfortune to sit out the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp--yet another setback for his vocational aspirations as a philosopher--although for a foreign-born French Jew, things could have been much worse.

After the war, Levinas taught at the École Normale Israélite Orientale, a preparatory school for Jewish teachers. Only in 1961, the year he completed his thèse de doctorat, was he rewarded with a university position in the provinces, at the University of Poitiers. In 1973 Levinas, now 67, received a professorship at the Sorbonne--the pinnacle of French university life. Three years later, he retired.

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