Review of Ethan Kleinberg. Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought. (original) (raw)

2022, Philosophy in Review

Kleinberg's recent book can be read as a biography of Emmanuel Levinas as a Jewish intellectual and educator. The pages of the book's four chapters have a two-column layout, labelled 'Our side' and 'the Other Side.' To that effect, we need to read the Introduction, then column A from chapters One through Four. Then, to go back and read column B from chapters One through Four, and lastly, the concluding chapter. If we follow the plain reading, we encounter a competent account of Levinas's intellectual development, with particular emphasis on his turn, after the war, from a career in philosophy and literature to an involvement with the problem of French Judaism's survival after the Holocaust. Kleinberg's account is solid, showcases the secondary literature, and benefits from the publication in recent years of Levinas's papers and drafts from the war and early postwar periods. In addition, Kleinberg provides a good characterization of Levinas's role as teacher and later director of the École Normale Israelite Orientale (the teachers training school of the Alliance Israelite Universel) and his involvement in the Colloques des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française. He provides a convenient chronological table of the meetings of the Colloques, their subjects, the title of Levinas's lecture, and the date of publication of the proceedings, or in some cases, of the publication of Levinas's lesson in other venues (xv-xviii). However, this reading would be contrary to the author's stated intentions. The whole layout of the book conspires against it. We need to treat the two-column page layout as a conceptual claim to follow the author's intention. Kleinberg follows Derrida's Glas's steps, using a multicolumn format. This format evokes the layout used in the traditional Jewish editions of Scripture and the Talmud, with one crucial difference. In the traditional Jewish editions, the center of the page is occupied by Scripture or the Talmudic text, surrounded by the most authoritative medieval commentaries. There is only commentary in Derrida's Glas and Kleinberg's text, unanchored to any consecrated ur-text. This architecture is supposed to explore the problem of the transcendence of Levinas's commentary. Kleinberg has been rehearsing this question in some of his previous work. A 2012 paper (In/finite Time: Tracing Transcendence to Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Lectures, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 20:3, 375-387) asks about transcendence in the context of Levinas's Totality and Infinity and suggests the importance of the Talmudic Turn for his thinking. His more recent Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (2017), refers to the present book as a concrete study of a double science of history inspired by Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence. Kleinberg presents his thesis in the Introduction, pointing to the fact that contrary to some of his disciples' hagiographical accounts of Levinas's life, he did not train in the study of the Talmud in the traditional 'Vilna style.' Therefore, he cannot be a link in the transmission chain, which originated in the Gaon of Vilna and his students and was later popularized by rabbi Chaim of Volozhin (p. 3). Levinas never made such a claim. On the contrary, he always claimed to be a pupil