one more point to Gratton

Two more posts, and then I really need to stop blogging for the day. The first is to Gratton (who surely knows the following, I just don’t think he emphasized it enough).

Gratton claimed that Levinas’s appropriation of Heidegger is too political. He referred to remarks on Nazism in De l’Evasion. (I read that work a number of years ago, was actually disappointed by it, and I don’t remember the political parts.)

But consider the following facts. These are from my memory of the Levinas biography I read, and it’s possible I’m misremembering a few things, but this is basically how the story went.

Levinas served in the French Army as a Russian translator. In the opening days of the invasion in WWII, his unit was surrounded and surrendered en masse. He then spent the remainder of the war in a POW camp. Although he was protected from deportation to a death camp by the Geneva Convention (amazingly, the Nazis seem to have followed it to that extent) he was forced to wear a yellow star and live in inferior Jewish barracks.

Levinas was from Kaunas, Lithuania. There, his father and brother were shot to death by the S.S. in the front yard of the family home. Lithuania was declared Judenfrei, and although a few dozens Jews apparently survived in hiding in Lithuania, I’m not aware that any members of the Levinas family were among them, meaning that the entire family was swept away. In France, Levinas’s mother-in-law was deported and never heard from again, and the same would surely have happened to his wife if not for the brave assistance of Blanchot.

Under these circumstances, I think it would have been understandable, perhaps even admirable, if Levinas had spent the rest of his life writing books with titles like: Heidegger Was an Evil Nazi, Not a Great Philosopher. Indeed, many people who weren’t even born yet at the time of WWII have written lots of things like that.

But Levinas never did that. He never wavered in his assertions that Heidegger was the greatest philosopher of the century and one of the greatest of all time. I find his attitude almost unnervingly serene.