Levinas and Medieval Literature: The "Difficult Reading" of English and Rabbinic Texts

by EILEEN JOY

Herewith I offer a shameless plug for the just-arrived book [available in both hardcover and paperback from Duquesne University Press], Levinas and Medieval Literature: The "Difficult Reading" of English and Rabbinic Texts, edited by Ann Astell and Justin Jackson, and in which I have a chapter, “'in his eyes stood a light, not beautiful': Levinas, Hospitality, Beowulf.”

In their preface to the book,“Before the Face of the Book,” Astell and Jackson ask, “What does a modern philosopher like Levinas have to do with medieval literature? Better put, what can sustained reflection on the work of Levinas contribute to the understanding of medieval texts? And conversely, what can medieval sources (and medievalist resources) contribute to the study of Levinas’s philosophy?” In partial answer, they write,

Certainly, Levinas cannot be said to have influenced the literature of the Middle Ages, but his writings—as the essays in this collection show—can truly alter our reception, our reading, of that literature. Of equal importance is the discovery that the literary works of the medieval period can illumine our understanding of the Levinasian oeuvre—its characteristic style, method, and themes, as well as its profound resistance to thematization. This is so, moreover, not just in the sense that Levinas indubitably read the literary works of medieval authors and was influenced by them, often in unacknowledged ways. Rather, despite manifest differences, the literature of the Middle Ages stands in a startling, close proximity to Levinas’s own.

What allows for this approximation across centuries is a third entity, which exists prior to the Middle Ages, to Levinas, and to us—namely, the sacred scriptures. Like medieval authors, Levinas accords a special status to the Bible. His writings may, indeed, be regarded as an original, modern, philosophical extension of the ancient biblical commentary tradition—its “translation” from “Hebrew” to “Greek.” Levinas explains: “Every philosophical thought rests on pre-philosophical experiences, and . . . for me, reading the Bible has belonged to these founding experiences.”

To the question, however, of whether or not Levinas's philosophy can have any bearing on literary criticism [as opposed to exegetical, or Biblical, commentary], Astell and Jackson cite Jill Robbins's caution that, “Levinas’s philosophy cannot function as an extrinsic approach to the literary work of art, that is, it cannot give rise to an application,” due to the “incommensurability between Levinas’s ethics and the discourse of literary criticism.” In response to this caution, Astell and Jackson argue that,

The literary criticism of the Middle Ages, however, unlike that of modernity, arguably understood the work of art in a manner akin to Levinas’s philosophy. Strongly tied to the materiality not only of manuscripts but also of human bodies, the literature of the medieval period was read aloud or sung, usually to a listening group of people, who responded with sounds, gestures, and interpretive commentary. For Levinas, as [Gerald] Bruns explains, “The sound of words is an ethical event, which Levinas does not hesitate to characterize as critique, not only because others interrupt me in making themselves felt, setting limits to my autonomy, but because even when I myself speak—even in self-expression—I am no longer an ‘I,’ am no longer self-identical, but am beside myself.” In answer to the question “Is self-expression only the manifestation of a thought by a sign?” Levinas answers no; self-expression is always already dialogic: “By the proffered word, the subject that posits himself exposes himself and, in a way, prays.”

Writing about the ancient “psalms of David . . . the prayers of Israel,” Levinas remarks, “They have become the liturgy of the nations. They trace out, in our space, the way leading from the most intimate interiority—to beyond all exteriority.” This way across time and peoples is possible, in Levinas’s understanding, not only because of a diachrony within time itself, but also because of the Oral Torah of the Jews: “Parable and homily (genres known by philologists, but which appear minor to them) have stored the treasures of Jewish thought and spirituality. . . .The Talmud and its commentaries, and the commentaries on these commentaries . . . prolong (while stabilizing in writing) a very ancient oral tradition from which the Bible emerged and in which, for a Jew, it breathes.” From the perspective of this Jewish (and, to a large extent, also historically Christian) experience, the Bible as a book is and remains a Saying, a word (verbe), that thrives in the inter-subjective space of the community: “In the Jewish reading, episodes, figures, teachings, words, letters, receive—through the immediate meaning, as if it were transparent—other innumerable meanings.” The Bible, precisely because its literal meaning is not transparent, generates the literary as a commentary upon itself and as an extension of its own opaque, mysterious, material, and spiritual speech.

Ultimately, according to Astell and Jackson, Levinas and Medieval Literature "is not a set of essays that try to apply Levinas’s philosophical insights one-directionally to works of medieval literature that are said to illustrate them. Instead, the two 'ands' in Levinas and Medieval Literature, English and Rabbinic imply a dialogical approach that (weirdly, perhaps, but engagingly) performs a contemporary resurrection that allows Levinas, medieval authors, and the exegetes of old to speak to each other, using proper names."

A brief preview of the volume's Table of Contents [which I, myself, cannot wait to read]:

• Valerie Allen, "Difficult Reading" [a "systematic exposition of the ways in which Levinas’s reading and writing reflect and continue (albeit in a modern, post-Holocaustal key) the tradition of medieval understandings and practices of the Book"]
• Susan Yager, "Levinas, Allegory, and Chaucer's Clerk's Tale" [argues that "medieval allegory, properly understood, is not the (Coleridgean) allegory from which Levinas properly distanced himself in his 1948 essay, “Reality and Its Shadow”; rather, allegory is a truly "speaking otherwise"]
• Eileen Joy, "in his eyes stood a light, not beautiful': Levinas, Hospitality, Beowulf" [takes up the "problematic relationship between ethics and politics in Levinas’s thought, especially as those two realms are joined in the single image of the home (or mead-hall) with its two facades: one opening inward, toward the secrecy of the domicile, and the other opening outward, toward the street, the wilderness, its strangers, and the hospitality due to them"]
• Alexander L. Kaufman, "There is Horror: The Awntyrs off Arthure, the Face of the Dead, and the Maternal Other" ["calls attention to the frightening ghost of Queen Guinevere’s mother and sets this ghost before and beside the Shakespearean ghosts to which Levinas frequently alludes"; "compares and contrasts the medieval poet’s exploration of the debt owed by the living to the still-living dead to Levinas’s opening memorial dedication of Otherwise Than Being to the victims of the Holocaust, including six of his own relatives"]
• Daniel T. Kline, "Doing Justice to Isaac: Levinas and the Brome Play of Abraham and Isaac" ["seconds and extends Levinas’s critique of Søren Kierkegaard’s treatment (in Fear and Trembling) of the akedah (the binding of Isaac) in Genesis 22"; "argues that the Brome play is more Levinasian than Levinas himself, in the way it extends the ethical relationship between Abraham and God to include Isaac (and Sarah) as a third party"]
• James J. Paxson, "The Personificational Face in Piers Plowman Rethought Through Levinas and Bronowski: Postmodern Philsophy, Scientific Humanism, and Problems in Late Medieval Personification Allegory" ["compares and contrasts Levinas’s notion of the Face with some other modern theorizations of the Face—specifically, the deManian cult of prosopopeia and the Deleuzean notion of machinic facialization"; this chapter also "finds an unexpected dialogue-partner for Levinas in the rationalist employment of the perceived human Face in the ‘scientific humanism’ of poet, philosopher, mathematician, and historian of science, Jacob Bronowski"]
• J.A. Jackson, "'And euer þe lenger þe lasse þe more': The Infinite Desire of Pearl" ["demonstrates the ways in which Pearl is already working through the simultaneity of the irreducible Divine-human/human-human relationship that concerns much of Levinas’s own writing"]
• J. Allan Mitchell, "Criseyde’s Chances: or, Courtly Love and Ethics About to Come" [considers "the theme of love’s adventure and, on that basis, reconsiders the potential moral dimensions of fortune in Troilus and Criseyde"; "draws support for his analysis from Levinas, who is 'particularly sensitive to the way love adumbrates the ethical relation by virtue of its fortuitousness, future contingency, exteriority and anteriority to the active will'"]
• Cynthia Kraman, "The Wound of the Infinite: Re-reading Levinas through Rashi’s Commentary on the Song of Songs" ["answering, in part, to feminist criticism of Levinas, Kraman explores Levinas’s view of Eros as an infinition by configuring it, in its positive and negative aspects, to Rashi’s verse-by-verse commentary on the biblical Song of Songs]
• Sandor Goodheart, "A Land that Devours Its Inhabitants: Midrashic Reading, Emmanuel Levinas, and Medieval Literary Exegesis" [argues that "reading Levinas, as he reads the rabbis, as they read the Torah, makes it possible for us to 'rediscover the contexts from which medieval literature appears to have come, its continuities with the ancient world in which allegoria, as translation, extends what, in fact, the midrashic thought of the Rabbis was already practicing'"]
• Ann W. Astell, "When Pardon is Impossible: Two Talmudic Tales, Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, and Levinas" ["adds Chaucer’s famous tale about avarice and sudden death to the Talmud’s two tales of Rab as a third, belated exemplum and a new narrative 'climate' in which to explore principles concerning forgiveness]
• Moshe Gold, "Those evil goslings, those evil stories: Letting the boys out of their cave, or a hyperbolic Levinasian encounter between Boccaccio and the Talmud" ["dares to comment on a Talmudic text (the story of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in a cave), upon which Levinas wrote no commentary, by pairing it with a tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron, rubbing the two medieval tales together" to argue that "both are 'retellings of the allegory of the cave (from Plato’s Republic)' that serve to 're-evaluate the Platonic good beyond being,' thus anticipating in an uncanny way Levinas’s own later reappraisal of it"]