for Levinas fans

It has a 2009 copyright date, but I didn’t realize it existed until last night: Volume 1 of what looks to be a projected complete edition of Levinas, with a general preface by Jean-Luc Marion. And Volume 1 has a title that jumps right out at you: “Carnets de captivité.” You can read all of his notes on Heidegger from the POW camp; very dramatic.

Levinas worked as a Russian translator for a unit of the French Army that was immediately surrounded and captured at the very beginning of the invasion in 1940. He then spent the entirety of the war at a POW camp near Hannover, and that period was the genesis of “De l’Existence à l’Existant,” which remains one of my favorite philosophical works ever written. (If you’re looking for a middle ground between imaginative critique of Heidegger and admiration for Heidegger, that’s a good place to look.) He did a lot of wood chopping in the POW camp, and his comrades reported that Levinas was often seen making entries in a notebook. I didn’t realize that the notebook still existed and would be published.

It also contains a whole section entitled “Hommage à Bergson.” Before Deleuze, I would say that Levinas was the one keeping the Bergson flame burning most brightly, although strangely enough, I don’t think there’s a lot of Bergson in Levinas’s own position. He simply admires him.