Michael Fagenblat | The Open University of Israel (original) (raw)

Papers by Michael Fagenblat

Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 2024

I argue that Heidegger’s account of the unique spiritual mission of the German people is implicit... more I argue that Heidegger’s account of the unique spiritual mission of the German people is implicitly haunted by the election of Israel. Heidegger's political ontology, sourced explicitly in Hoelderlin and the Greeks, is implicitly shaped by three conceptions of the mission of Israel: biblical salvation history, kabbalistic panentheism, and Germany literary Hebraism. To link these disparate historical phenomena to Heidegger’s account of the mission of being German, I develop a methodological approach for understanding Heidegger’s “free use of the national” that accounts for the way it binds different sources into a new way of configuring "the Greco-German mission" that is haunted by the spirit of Israel.

Religions, 2024

In response to the rise of neopagan fascist political theologies in Europe in the 1930s, the youn... more In response to the rise of neopagan fascist political theologies in Europe in the 1930s, the young Emmanuel Levinas developed a novel conception of the theopolitical role of Judaism. The existing scholarly consensus maintains that (1) Levinas responded to the rise of pagan Hitlerism by opposing it to a Jewish conception of transcendence and (2) this putative contrast involved a critique of Heidegger’s thought, which Levinas identified with pagan Hitlerism. By focusing on under-examined occasional pieces Levinas wrote in the 1930s, I offer a significantly revised understanding of Levinas’s position in the 1930s. The argument shows how Levinas describes Judaism as a way of ‘being riveted’ that does not resort to transcendence, as does the Greco-Christian West, but rather affirms the immanence of existence while breaking with its disposition to paganism. This places Levinas’s conception of Judaism on the same plane as paganism and within the terms of Heidegger’s philosophy. From this perspective, a new way of understanding Levinas’s theopolitical view of Judaism takes shape. Far from thinking of Judaism in terms of "transcendence" (much less "ethics"), in the 1930's Levinas figures Judaism as an anti-pagan way of being riveted to the concrete immanence of embodied, historical, created existence.

Levinas and Literature, 2020

Levinas and Literature: New Directions, 2021

This is the Introduction to the edited collection. Rather than survey the chapters in detail I fr... more This is the Introduction to the edited collection. Rather than survey the chapters in detail I frame the question of literature in Levinas's work in light of the posthumous release of his unpublished war-time diaries, drafts of two novels and lectures. I explain why the posthumous material is important for understanding Levinas and in particular for clarifying his ambivalent relation to literature. On the one hand, literature is aligned with art, irreality and an ontology of sensation without reference while on the other hand it is unique among the arts in directly invoking the Other. In this second capacity literature is able address the singularity of the Other within the generality of discourse. I show how this account of literature reflects Levinas's view of religion both in its critical and its affirmative modes.

Levinas and Literature: New Directions, 2021

I show how Genesis 1-11 provides the implicit hermeneutical backstage of the phenomenological acc... more I show how Genesis 1-11 provides the implicit hermeneutical backstage of the phenomenological account of "ethics" in Totality and Infinity. This is an alternative to Simon Critchley's reading in The Problem of Levinas. I too follow Levinas's footnote to Nietzsche's comment on Doric drama at the end of The Case of Wagner but it leads me to a difference primal scene, the primeval history of Genesis 1-11, to which Levinas makes frequent allusion in Totality and Infinity as in the Inedits.

Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life. Eds Michael Fagenblat, Melis Erdur , 2020

I show how Levinas argues for a way of grounding subjectivity as being-answerable to the claims o... more I show how Levinas argues for a way of grounding subjectivity as being-answerable to the claims of meaning on the basis of one's answerability to a moral claim from some singular other person. I do this by comparing Levinas's account of answerabiity to those by Steven Darwall, who grounds answerability in communal norms, and John Gardner, who ground it on our rational nature. I show how both Darwall and Gardner make recourse to traditional grounds of answerability, whereas Levinas denies that these grounds justify the answerability that one is and instead provides a third way of grounding answerability in direct relation to the second person. I then discuss the need for answerabiltiy to be not only grounded but also maintained. This involves a consideration of the temporality of answerability. Levinas's position is brought into relief by comparing it to Samuel Scheffler's view of the temporality of mattering. For Scheffler, the temporality of morality depends on a relation to future others. Levinas's position is more radical and more plausible. It is not only the temporality of morality that depends on a relation to future others but the temporality of all mattering, all meaning. Maintaining answerability thus goes to the identity of being and understanding oneself, an identity dependent on a relation to second person singular others.

Routledge, 2019

Proofs of my 3 page Preface to _Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and th... more Proofs of my 3 page Preface to _Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life_

Chapter on Levinas and Heidegger in Oxford Handbook of Levinas, ed. Michael Morgan (2018)

Chapter in _Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity_ (Indiana UP 2017

Introduction to Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (Indiana UP 2017)

In _Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others_ eds. Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik. Lanham :... more In _Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others_ eds. Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik. Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. (New Heidegger research). 245-267.

The paper attempts to show (1) how Heidegger's political ontology provides a philosophical resource for understanding the Jewish political imaginary in Israel and (2) how Heidegger's way of depicting the exchange between ancient Greeks and contemporary Germans recapitulates the theological imaginary at work in the exchange between ancient and contemporary Jewish accounts of the relation of thinking to presence.

Is There a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective, eds. Emmanuel Nathan and Anya Topolski

I analyze Emmanuel Levinas's engagement with the problematic concept of "Judaeo-Christianity". Us... more I analyze Emmanuel Levinas's engagement with the problematic concept of "Judaeo-Christianity". Using Levinas's war journals I show that the concept appealed to him as a way of supplementing an ontology of manifest forms derived from the Greek tradition with an ontology of invisible significations. I then show how this presented Levinas with a dilemma concerning the specific differences between Jewish and Christian renderings of this ontological supplement and how he attempted to resolve this dilemma.

Across four decades of writing, Levinas repeatedly referred to the Holocaust as Fthe Passion of I... more Across four decades of writing, Levinas repeatedly referred to the Holocaust as Fthe Passion of Israel at Auschwitz`. This deliberately Christological interpretation of the Holocaust raises questions about the respective roles of Judaism and Christianity in Levinas' thought and seems at odds with his well-known view that suffering is Fuseless`. Basing my interpretation on the journals Levinas wrote as a prisoner of war and a radio talk he delivered in September 1945, I argue that his philosophical project is best understood as an ontological rendering of Judaism that accounts for the opening or transcendence of sense and intelligibility. Judaism provides Levinas with a salient critique of liberal and idealist philosophies of the subject and an alternative to fundamental ontology. I show how Levinas' account of the FPassion ofIsraeì can be read within the exegetical history of Jewish accounts of divine suffering and thereby effects a reversal of the Christian typological gaze. I conclude by suggesting that Levinas' recourse to Judaism as a philosophical category does not assume a dogmatic origin to philosophy but Fformally indicates`, in the Heideggerian sense, the phenom-enological origins of normativity. In this respect, the FPassion ofIsraeì involves not only a reversal of the Christian typological gaze but also a deconstruction of Judaism.

Article published in Bamidbar 5.2 (2015), pp. 21-55. http://www.bamidbar-journal.org/ I expl... more Article published in Bamidbar 5.2 (2015), pp. 21-55.
http://www.bamidbar-journal.org/

I explain why W. Benjamin and G. Agamben think that late modernity, especially in the form of late capitalism, fails to neutralize the authority structures of religion and therefore calls for profanation of such structures rather than secularization. This leads me to consider how Frankist Jews profaned the structures of orthodox Judaism and Christianity in a manner that allows us to imagine forms of human existence that do not merely invert the authority structures of religion but alter them. I discuss four such structures: national, gender, territorial and economic. This view of Frankism as a liberating profanation gives it more systemic affinity to members of the Frankfurt School than is usually supposed. I discuss each of these profanations in relation to the thought of Ernst Bloch and contrast them with Scholem's views, which vacillate between secularization and inwardness. In this way I hope to establish a commonality of inspiration and a continuity of purpose between Frankists like Ariyeh von Honigsberg and Frankfurtists like Bloch and Benjamin. Such commonality and continuity legitimates our regard of such thinkers as profoundly faithful exponents of critical Jewish modernity.

SOPHIA , 2015

I offer a phenomenological analysis of the syntagm 'glory of Yhwh' which appears in relatively fe... more I offer a phenomenological analysis of the syntagm 'glory of Yhwh' which appears in relatively few but significant places in the Hebrew Bible. I discuss the biblical sense of this syntagm and make the argument for understanding it as a 'formally indicative' concept, in Heidegger's sense of 'formale Anzeige'. I thereby make the case for understanding the anthropomorphic, amoral and numinous qualities of the biblical syntagm in a way that illuminates contemporary phenomenological senses of being, including contingency, unforeseeability, respect, dignity, sublimity and saturation. The biblical syntagm is thus shown to contravene and outstrip metaphysical theology while illuminating contemporary experience, both sacred and secular. The syntagm ḵ'ḇôḏ Yhwh, translated as 'the glory of the LORD' or 'the presence of the LORD', belongs to the core of biblical and later Jewish theological experience. It appears at the formative revelations to the people and prophets of Israel, is a devotional focal point of Jewish liturgical life, and is attested at the peaks of Jewish mystical experience and speculation. 1 But the prospect of direct manifestations of the ḵ'ḇôḏ or glory of Yhwh flies in the face of theological orthodoxies concerning God's

In _Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks 1931–1941_ Eds. Ingo Farin, Jeff Malpas MIT Press, 2016

The political background to the debate between Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas has often di... more The political background to the debate between Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas has often distorted the philosophical dispute. At its worst, Levinas is cast like the Bear Jew in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, valiantly battling the dastardly Deutsche. Fortunately, this volume approaches the debate with a clear view of the philosophical issues. It avoids polemically misconstruing Heidegger's thought without making light of Levinas's modification of it. The chapters approach the debate from a range of complementary angles that bring the discussion to a new level of nuance and understanding. The variety of contributors, which includes established experts and younger scholars, both from France and the U.S., adds to its interest.

Politics is liturgy by other means. This is the novel idea proposed by Georgio Agamben. For Paul ... more Politics is liturgy by other means. This is the novel idea proposed by Georgio Agamben. For Paul Kahn, on the other hand, politics is the sacrificial practice of freedom. In his view, modern political agents transcend themselves, and thus become free, by sacrificing themselves for the sake of the popular sovereign -''the people'' whose imagined unity and sacred presence legitimates the nation-state. Despite their immensely different styles, these leading exponents of modern political theology share the conviction that contemporary political life continues to be shaped by the religious heritage that gave rise to it. The method of political theology, however, is quite different from sociological inquiry into the forces religion still exerts over individual and collective agents or the study of politics as a civil or state religion. 1 Nor is it ultimately concerned to historicize the secular age and its political institutions by reference to their Christian origins, though for Agamben the genealogy of concepts is methodologically indispensible. Nevertheless, important as the historical and sociological components of modern political theology are, practitioners of the discipline are primarily interested in something else, namely, the reappearance of theological concepts and theological experiences in ostensibly secular political life. This distinctly modern type of political theology is therefore to be distinguished from investigations of the relation between church and state, the role of religious belief in political systems, or the degree to which religious clerics wield direct and indirect political power. The political theology of interest here begins by accepting, in large measure, the separation of church and state as a characteristic feature of modern political life in order to examine how secular politics, separated from institutional religion, extends the structures, implications and experiences of theology. The claim is that without an ''archeology'' of modern political concepts (Agamben) or a ''phenomenology'' of their theological character (Kahn) we will continue to be surprised by the sacralization that the sociologist describes, and deceived by our expectations of secular political life.

Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 2024

I argue that Heidegger’s account of the unique spiritual mission of the German people is implicit... more I argue that Heidegger’s account of the unique spiritual mission of the German people is implicitly haunted by the election of Israel. Heidegger's political ontology, sourced explicitly in Hoelderlin and the Greeks, is implicitly shaped by three conceptions of the mission of Israel: biblical salvation history, kabbalistic panentheism, and Germany literary Hebraism. To link these disparate historical phenomena to Heidegger’s account of the mission of being German, I develop a methodological approach for understanding Heidegger’s “free use of the national” that accounts for the way it binds different sources into a new way of configuring "the Greco-German mission" that is haunted by the spirit of Israel.

Religions, 2024

In response to the rise of neopagan fascist political theologies in Europe in the 1930s, the youn... more In response to the rise of neopagan fascist political theologies in Europe in the 1930s, the young Emmanuel Levinas developed a novel conception of the theopolitical role of Judaism. The existing scholarly consensus maintains that (1) Levinas responded to the rise of pagan Hitlerism by opposing it to a Jewish conception of transcendence and (2) this putative contrast involved a critique of Heidegger’s thought, which Levinas identified with pagan Hitlerism. By focusing on under-examined occasional pieces Levinas wrote in the 1930s, I offer a significantly revised understanding of Levinas’s position in the 1930s. The argument shows how Levinas describes Judaism as a way of ‘being riveted’ that does not resort to transcendence, as does the Greco-Christian West, but rather affirms the immanence of existence while breaking with its disposition to paganism. This places Levinas’s conception of Judaism on the same plane as paganism and within the terms of Heidegger’s philosophy. From this perspective, a new way of understanding Levinas’s theopolitical view of Judaism takes shape. Far from thinking of Judaism in terms of "transcendence" (much less "ethics"), in the 1930's Levinas figures Judaism as an anti-pagan way of being riveted to the concrete immanence of embodied, historical, created existence.

Levinas and Literature, 2020

Levinas and Literature: New Directions, 2021

This is the Introduction to the edited collection. Rather than survey the chapters in detail I fr... more This is the Introduction to the edited collection. Rather than survey the chapters in detail I frame the question of literature in Levinas's work in light of the posthumous release of his unpublished war-time diaries, drafts of two novels and lectures. I explain why the posthumous material is important for understanding Levinas and in particular for clarifying his ambivalent relation to literature. On the one hand, literature is aligned with art, irreality and an ontology of sensation without reference while on the other hand it is unique among the arts in directly invoking the Other. In this second capacity literature is able address the singularity of the Other within the generality of discourse. I show how this account of literature reflects Levinas's view of religion both in its critical and its affirmative modes.

Levinas and Literature: New Directions, 2021

I show how Genesis 1-11 provides the implicit hermeneutical backstage of the phenomenological acc... more I show how Genesis 1-11 provides the implicit hermeneutical backstage of the phenomenological account of "ethics" in Totality and Infinity. This is an alternative to Simon Critchley's reading in The Problem of Levinas. I too follow Levinas's footnote to Nietzsche's comment on Doric drama at the end of The Case of Wagner but it leads me to a difference primal scene, the primeval history of Genesis 1-11, to which Levinas makes frequent allusion in Totality and Infinity as in the Inedits.

Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life. Eds Michael Fagenblat, Melis Erdur , 2020

I show how Levinas argues for a way of grounding subjectivity as being-answerable to the claims o... more I show how Levinas argues for a way of grounding subjectivity as being-answerable to the claims of meaning on the basis of one's answerability to a moral claim from some singular other person. I do this by comparing Levinas's account of answerabiity to those by Steven Darwall, who grounds answerability in communal norms, and John Gardner, who ground it on our rational nature. I show how both Darwall and Gardner make recourse to traditional grounds of answerability, whereas Levinas denies that these grounds justify the answerability that one is and instead provides a third way of grounding answerability in direct relation to the second person. I then discuss the need for answerabiltiy to be not only grounded but also maintained. This involves a consideration of the temporality of answerability. Levinas's position is brought into relief by comparing it to Samuel Scheffler's view of the temporality of mattering. For Scheffler, the temporality of morality depends on a relation to future others. Levinas's position is more radical and more plausible. It is not only the temporality of morality that depends on a relation to future others but the temporality of all mattering, all meaning. Maintaining answerability thus goes to the identity of being and understanding oneself, an identity dependent on a relation to second person singular others.

Routledge, 2019

Proofs of my 3 page Preface to _Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and th... more Proofs of my 3 page Preface to _Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life_

Chapter on Levinas and Heidegger in Oxford Handbook of Levinas, ed. Michael Morgan (2018)

Chapter in _Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity_ (Indiana UP 2017

Introduction to Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (Indiana UP 2017)

In _Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others_ eds. Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik. Lanham :... more In _Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others_ eds. Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik. Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. (New Heidegger research). 245-267.

The paper attempts to show (1) how Heidegger's political ontology provides a philosophical resource for understanding the Jewish political imaginary in Israel and (2) how Heidegger's way of depicting the exchange between ancient Greeks and contemporary Germans recapitulates the theological imaginary at work in the exchange between ancient and contemporary Jewish accounts of the relation of thinking to presence.

Is There a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective, eds. Emmanuel Nathan and Anya Topolski

I analyze Emmanuel Levinas's engagement with the problematic concept of "Judaeo-Christianity". Us... more I analyze Emmanuel Levinas's engagement with the problematic concept of "Judaeo-Christianity". Using Levinas's war journals I show that the concept appealed to him as a way of supplementing an ontology of manifest forms derived from the Greek tradition with an ontology of invisible significations. I then show how this presented Levinas with a dilemma concerning the specific differences between Jewish and Christian renderings of this ontological supplement and how he attempted to resolve this dilemma.

Across four decades of writing, Levinas repeatedly referred to the Holocaust as Fthe Passion of I... more Across four decades of writing, Levinas repeatedly referred to the Holocaust as Fthe Passion of Israel at Auschwitz`. This deliberately Christological interpretation of the Holocaust raises questions about the respective roles of Judaism and Christianity in Levinas' thought and seems at odds with his well-known view that suffering is Fuseless`. Basing my interpretation on the journals Levinas wrote as a prisoner of war and a radio talk he delivered in September 1945, I argue that his philosophical project is best understood as an ontological rendering of Judaism that accounts for the opening or transcendence of sense and intelligibility. Judaism provides Levinas with a salient critique of liberal and idealist philosophies of the subject and an alternative to fundamental ontology. I show how Levinas' account of the FPassion ofIsraeì can be read within the exegetical history of Jewish accounts of divine suffering and thereby effects a reversal of the Christian typological gaze. I conclude by suggesting that Levinas' recourse to Judaism as a philosophical category does not assume a dogmatic origin to philosophy but Fformally indicates`, in the Heideggerian sense, the phenom-enological origins of normativity. In this respect, the FPassion ofIsraeì involves not only a reversal of the Christian typological gaze but also a deconstruction of Judaism.

Article published in Bamidbar 5.2 (2015), pp. 21-55. http://www.bamidbar-journal.org/ I expl... more Article published in Bamidbar 5.2 (2015), pp. 21-55.
http://www.bamidbar-journal.org/

I explain why W. Benjamin and G. Agamben think that late modernity, especially in the form of late capitalism, fails to neutralize the authority structures of religion and therefore calls for profanation of such structures rather than secularization. This leads me to consider how Frankist Jews profaned the structures of orthodox Judaism and Christianity in a manner that allows us to imagine forms of human existence that do not merely invert the authority structures of religion but alter them. I discuss four such structures: national, gender, territorial and economic. This view of Frankism as a liberating profanation gives it more systemic affinity to members of the Frankfurt School than is usually supposed. I discuss each of these profanations in relation to the thought of Ernst Bloch and contrast them with Scholem's views, which vacillate between secularization and inwardness. In this way I hope to establish a commonality of inspiration and a continuity of purpose between Frankists like Ariyeh von Honigsberg and Frankfurtists like Bloch and Benjamin. Such commonality and continuity legitimates our regard of such thinkers as profoundly faithful exponents of critical Jewish modernity.

SOPHIA , 2015

I offer a phenomenological analysis of the syntagm 'glory of Yhwh' which appears in relatively fe... more I offer a phenomenological analysis of the syntagm 'glory of Yhwh' which appears in relatively few but significant places in the Hebrew Bible. I discuss the biblical sense of this syntagm and make the argument for understanding it as a 'formally indicative' concept, in Heidegger's sense of 'formale Anzeige'. I thereby make the case for understanding the anthropomorphic, amoral and numinous qualities of the biblical syntagm in a way that illuminates contemporary phenomenological senses of being, including contingency, unforeseeability, respect, dignity, sublimity and saturation. The biblical syntagm is thus shown to contravene and outstrip metaphysical theology while illuminating contemporary experience, both sacred and secular. The syntagm ḵ'ḇôḏ Yhwh, translated as 'the glory of the LORD' or 'the presence of the LORD', belongs to the core of biblical and later Jewish theological experience. It appears at the formative revelations to the people and prophets of Israel, is a devotional focal point of Jewish liturgical life, and is attested at the peaks of Jewish mystical experience and speculation. 1 But the prospect of direct manifestations of the ḵ'ḇôḏ or glory of Yhwh flies in the face of theological orthodoxies concerning God's

In _Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks 1931–1941_ Eds. Ingo Farin, Jeff Malpas MIT Press, 2016

The political background to the debate between Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas has often di... more The political background to the debate between Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas has often distorted the philosophical dispute. At its worst, Levinas is cast like the Bear Jew in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, valiantly battling the dastardly Deutsche. Fortunately, this volume approaches the debate with a clear view of the philosophical issues. It avoids polemically misconstruing Heidegger's thought without making light of Levinas's modification of it. The chapters approach the debate from a range of complementary angles that bring the discussion to a new level of nuance and understanding. The variety of contributors, which includes established experts and younger scholars, both from France and the U.S., adds to its interest.

Politics is liturgy by other means. This is the novel idea proposed by Georgio Agamben. For Paul ... more Politics is liturgy by other means. This is the novel idea proposed by Georgio Agamben. For Paul Kahn, on the other hand, politics is the sacrificial practice of freedom. In his view, modern political agents transcend themselves, and thus become free, by sacrificing themselves for the sake of the popular sovereign -''the people'' whose imagined unity and sacred presence legitimates the nation-state. Despite their immensely different styles, these leading exponents of modern political theology share the conviction that contemporary political life continues to be shaped by the religious heritage that gave rise to it. The method of political theology, however, is quite different from sociological inquiry into the forces religion still exerts over individual and collective agents or the study of politics as a civil or state religion. 1 Nor is it ultimately concerned to historicize the secular age and its political institutions by reference to their Christian origins, though for Agamben the genealogy of concepts is methodologically indispensible. Nevertheless, important as the historical and sociological components of modern political theology are, practitioners of the discipline are primarily interested in something else, namely, the reappearance of theological concepts and theological experiences in ostensibly secular political life. This distinctly modern type of political theology is therefore to be distinguished from investigations of the relation between church and state, the role of religious belief in political systems, or the degree to which religious clerics wield direct and indirect political power. The political theology of interest here begins by accepting, in large measure, the separation of church and state as a characteristic feature of modern political life in order to examine how secular politics, separated from institutional religion, extends the structures, implications and experiences of theology. The claim is that without an ''archeology'' of modern political concepts (Agamben) or a ''phenomenology'' of their theological character (Kahn) we will continue to be surprised by the sacralization that the sociologist describes, and deceived by our expectations of secular political life.

An intriguing thesis slithers through this impressively profuse and promiscuous garden of sociohi... more An intriguing thesis slithers through this impressively profuse and promiscuous garden of sociohistorical erudition. Religion is not experiencing a comeback, the renowned scholar of political Islam argues, but a significant transformation brought about by the secularization intended to marginalize and diminish it. The modern walls of separation erected between church and state and the emergence of the secular public sphere have not weakened religion but purified and empowered it. Unloosed from the moderating and meliorating influence of culture, religion has become radicalized and de territorialized, faith communities have been de-ethnicized and globalized, and worldly knowledge has been replaced by "holy ignorance." The irony is tempting, and the array of evidence -from the spread of Pentecostalism to the development of the Ramakrishna Mission to the Ukrainian pilgrimages of Breslover Hasidim, and on -truly dazzling. Blink. Examine the cases. Compare and contrast. With religion, too, the devil is in the details.

Text Theory Critique, 2005

AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF …, 2000

Speculum: A journal of medieval studies, 2005

Journal of The History of Philosophy, 2010

Common Knowledge, 2009

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47... more This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Faxorders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail iuporder@indiana.edu © 2008 by Hilary Putnam ...

De Gruyter, 2021

The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas’s wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts fo... more The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas’s wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts for two novels afford new approaches to understanding the relationship between literature, philosophy, and religion. This volume gathers an international list of experts to examine new questions raised by Levinas’s deep and creative experiment in thinking at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. Chapters address the role and significance of poetry, narrative, and metaphor in accessing the ethical sense of ordinary life; Levinas's critical engagement with authors such as Leon Bloy, Paul Celan, Vassily Grossman, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot; analyses of Levinas’s draft novels Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler; and the application of Levinas's thought in reading contemporary authors such as Ian McEwen and Cormac McCarthy. Contributors include Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Kevin Hart, Eric Hoppenot, Vivian Liska, Jean-Luc Nancy and François-David Sebbah, among others.

Routledge. Research in Phenomenology, 2019

Table of Contents Preface: Analyzing Levinas Michael Fagenblat Part I. Second-Person Normativit... more Table of Contents

Preface: Analyzing Levinas
Michael Fagenblat

Part I. Second-Person Normativity

"Second-Person Reasons: Darwall, Levinas, and the Phenomenology of Reason"
Steven G. Crowell

"The Second Source of Normativity and its Implications for Reflective Endorsement: Levinas and Korsgaard"
Michael Barber

"Grounding and Maintaining Answerability"
Michael Fagenblat

"Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou relation"
Patricia Meindl, Felipe León, and Dan Zahavi

"Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable: What is the Normative Standing of the Other in Levinas?"
James H. P. Lewis and Robert A. Stern

Part II. Ethical Metaphysics

"The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity"
Michael Roubach

"Levinas on the Second-Person Structure of Free Will"
Kevin Houser

'Personal Knowledge"
Sophie-Grace Chappell

Part III. Ethics and moral philosophy

'Desire for the Good"
Fiona Ellis

"Levinas, Tomasello, Strawson, Wallace: Reflections on Sociality and Morality"
Michael Morgan

"Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context"
Diane Perpich

"Between Virtue Theory and the Theory of Subjectivity: Noddings’s Care, Levinas’s Responsibility, and Slote’s Receptivity"
Guoping Zhao

"Levinasian "Ethics as a First Philosophy" in Analytic Philosophy"
Melis Erdur

"Against a Clear Conscience: A Levinasian Response to Williams’ Challenge"
Søren Overgaard

Edited volume. Indiana University Press. Bloomington. 2017. New Jewish Philosophy and Thought. Se... more Edited volume.
Indiana University Press. Bloomington. 2017.
New Jewish Philosophy and Thought. Series Editor Zachary J. Braiterman

Paul and Philosophy. Ed. Ole Jakob Løland. Fortress Press, (submitted). 18pp.

This written interview took place a couple of years ago and I'm not sure if the planned volume wi... more This written interview took place a couple of years ago and I'm not sure if the planned volume will in fact materialize. So here it is.