One of the first questions one can imagine about levinassian philosophy is probably: what –for heaven's sake– can I do with it? The first answer you may well expect to get is: be kinder, or at least less unkind, to yr neighbour. If you were to ask me, however, possible replies will be different. What about maybe asking some questions about yourself? I fear the popular interpretation of Levinas as an ethical thinker shies away from what he writes about ourselves, our separateness and our psychism or inner life. On the one hand he makes it easier, by presenting serious food for thought about it in his writings. On the other, the more you think about it, the harder it becomes to reach anything like some kind of awareness as to the inner meaning of it – i.e. of oneself.
Awareness – in a previous life, some years ago, I have done some thinking and writing [in Dutch] about mindfulness and meditation. For Levinas, our inner life means something like doing more than, or even better than just thinking. It's about taste and enjoyment, about sensibility – and it occurs to you most probably unwillingly. Can you meditate about what happens in one's unpremeditated experiences?
"The psychism constitutes an event in being", writes Levinas in Alphonso Lingis' translation of Totality and Infinity [p. 54] – an event that is "not situated with respect to the time of history as an absolute." And in one of his ultra-rapid sidelines he adds: "This is why the life between birth and death is neither folly nor absurdity nor flight or cowardice." [p. 56] O dear, I seem to be intruding already in the work in the Bibliothèque that is only just beginning… But hopefully, if starting a website may have some caracteristics of a birth, I am still in time for some meditation concerning the great Birth-event of our Western world that we shall commemorate tomorrow.