Reflections on Levinas and literature

ENWith a sense of the renewed uncertainty and trauma over the human, writers like Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, and Primo Levi have created literature rooted in a Levinasian sense of the human. Not all literature will or can be of this kind, but if Levinas gives us the hope and suggests ways in which the human can be more fully realized, inevitably literature in response will have a future. As a counter to the limitations of abstraction and self-referential traditions of thought, and here I think of Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger, and as an admirer of many works of literature, another quote from his valued Shakespeare comes to mind. I seem to hear Levinas quoting Hamlet again, with a tone of gentle but urgent irony: “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”.