Beyond phenomenology: Levinas’s early Jewish writings

ENJoelle Hansel’s essay not only clarifies Levinas’s relationship with Judaism prior to his undertaking a serious study of the Talmud after the war, but also shows how Levinas’s later attempt to go beyond phenomenology was already anticipated, in germ at least, in his early writings on Judaism. Focusing much of her account on a revised transcript of an interview Levinas gave on a Jewish program of the French Radio on April 9, 1937, entitled “The Meaning of Religious Practice” (reprinted in this volume), Hansel tries to show how Levinas’s phenomenology of concrete forms of Jewish ritual and liturgy reveals a domain in which resides the “mystery” that Levinas will later characterize as ethics.