The biography of Levinas is published, restoring a real face of Levinas

At the beginning of the new year, the biography of the heavyweight "Levinas Biography" was published. Emanuel · Levinas was a famous French philosopher of the 20th century, who developed a series of important philosophical concepts such as existence, existence, and others; he was also a 100% Jewish thinker, and the unique way of thinking and lifestyle of Jewish culture continued throughout his life.

△ The Biography of Levinas [ Law ] Solomon · Marka by Gong Weimin Translated by Guangxi Normal University Press / I Think, January 2022

The famous contemporary philosopher Jacques Derrida confessed: "My mind benefits from three people: Heidegger, Brownshaw, levinas. Paul · Lico said of one of Levinas's masterpieces, The Total and the Infinite: "I really appreciate and understand all the great pages about the family in Total and Infinite ... Before Derrida, only Levinas talked about this in this way. "

The biography of Levinas is a complete record of the life experience and ideological development process of Levinas who was born in Eastern Europe, studied France and Germany, and became famous in France. Author Solomon · Marka was a French writer, journalist, and historian of Jewish thought who studied with Levinas from his teenage years. After Levinas' death in 1995, Marka spent five years preparing for the biography.

Wang Jiajun, a professor at the Department of Chinese at East China Normal University, said: "This biography is interwoven with the author's memories of Levinas, interviews with his relatives and friends, and visits to the 'place' of his life... They constitute the 'trail' of Levinas. Through these traces, we are approaching Levinas, and at the same time, he becomes stranger to us. We see his ordinary and sacred daily life, which both helps us to understand his thoughts and seems to be more distant from us than his thoughts. Through these traces, we are both close and far from Him, which is precisely the 'closeness' expounded by Levinas, in which Levinas is both the object of understanding and the other. "

Marka travels through time and space, searching for traces of Levinas's life: from his childhood lithuanian town of Kaunas, to pre-war Paris, to Nazi concentration camps; from Davos to Leuven, from the Vatican to Tel Aviv; from the corridors of the Israeli Normal School in the East to the stepped classrooms of the Sorbonne University; from his lonely and nameless work alone to being known all over the world.

Professor Sun Xiangchen, dean of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, commented on the book: "Philosophy is often a de-contextualized intellectual undertaking, and Levinas's philosophy needs to be reset into the context of his life to be better understood." Insomnia, burnout, escape, responsibility, hostages, a series of thought-provoking philosophical concepts that require the experience of life to activate. As Levinas said, we cannot separate the information we receive from the face of the necessary interlocutor. Solomon · Marka's biography presents us with the vivid face of its interlocutor, Levinas. "

The important faces intertwined in the traces of Levinas's life are all involved in the portrayal of his personality in this book: close friend Maurice Brownshaw, Jean Val, mentor Shushani; people who had a significant influence on him, Husserl, Heidegger, Rosenzweg; and the interlocutor, Paul Schwarzweig; and the interlocutor, Paul Schwarzkopf. Lico, Jacques · Derrida et al. As such, this biography is also a unique glimpse into the 20th century. Its strength is that it fully excavates levinas's Jewish character and shows truthfully the balance he has achieved between his philosopherhood and his Jewish identity.

(Edited by Zhang Yu)