A Covenant of Creatures Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism [Paperback]

I am not a particularly Jewish thinker, said Emmanuel Levinas, I am just a thinker. This book argues against the idea, affirmed by Levinas himself, thatTotality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Beingseparate philosophy from Judaism. By reading Levinas's philosophical works through the prism of Judaic texts and ideas, Michael Fagenblat argues that what Levinas called ethics is as much a hermeneutical product wrought from the Judaic heritage as a series of phenomenological observations. Decoding the Levinas's philosophy of Judaism within a Heideggerian and Pauline framework, Fagenblat uses biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts to provide sustained interpretations of the philosopher's work. Ultimately he calls for a reconsideration of the relation between tradition and philosophy, and of the meaning of faith after the death of epistemology. Michael Fagenblat'sA Covenant of Creaturesis a bold and powerful book . . . I am seduced by Fagenblat's textual interpretations of Jewish texts, through a Levinassian lens. According to the famous Talmudic story in which a heathen challenges Hillel to reveal the whole of Torah while standing on one foot, the sage not only declares its essence to lie in the ethics of neighbor-love, relegating the rest to the status of 'mere' commentary; he enjoins his interlocutor to study that very textual supplement. Michael Fagenblat has made an utterly compelling case that a similar injunction is at work in Levinas's conception of ethical responsibility in the face of the Other. It, too, implies that this strange creaturethe neighborcan only be revealedexegetically, in the working through of the hermeneutic dimension of the urgent phenomenological 'givenness' of the Other. In this beautifully written and conceptually rigorous page-turner, Fagenblat teaches us to resist the impasses of prior readings of Levinas, which remain stuck within the sterile opposition of phenomenology and theology, Athens and Jerusalem, thil3!