Speaking philosophy: John Wild’s commentary on "Totality and Infinity"

ENJohn Wild guided the existential phenomenological movement in America for a generation. It was my privilege to have studied with him during the last eight years of his long and distinguished philosophic career. When he died on October 7, 1972 at the age of 70, Wild left a vast collection of posthumous, unpublished papers. Among these papers, in particular, was this important manuscript, an untitled commentary and interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas’ epochal work Totality and Infinity. The original manuscript contains seventy-nine typed pages. The manuscript is self-contained, although there are a number of comments and asides penciled in by Wild, some written in his distinctive shorthand. While the manuscript is undated, it almost certainly derives from the last creative years of his career, 1968-1970. During this time Wild directed seminars devoted to the explication of Totality and Infinity for graduate students and interested faculty at Yale University. He subsequently taught a course on Levinas during his last year of active teaching in 1970 at the University of Florida. The decision to edit the manuscript, as opposed to leaving it completely intact with minor mechanical changes has been a difficult one. This is especially important, given the fact that Wild’s commentary reflects the same kind of clarity, originality, and sense of urgency that is the hallmark of his published scholarship. In fact, virtually the entire text is included here. While the text surely forms a coherent whole, it is often marked by pauses, hesitations, and asides. To delete the marginalia would, perhaps, simplify the work ofthe reader who is interested only in making his way through Totality and Infinity, a demanding task in its own right. However, such deletions would alter the inflection of Wild’s tone and style here, thereby separating the author from his work, or to use the language of Levinas, to separate the “Saying” from the “Said.”.