With his move from frontier-city Strasbourg to Paris Levinas ventured into the capital that would become "an international rather than a merely French centre", and "a powerhouse of the modern movement' – as English readers can read in Martin Esslin's classic study of the Theatre of the Absurd [p. 26, French readers will find more references in the Bibliothèque]. Like many other important French-writing authors before and after World War II he clearly was a first-generation immigrant using the strange language with the utmost precision, in order to profit as much as possible of the treasures in vocabulary and grammar it offered. In all my reading of his philosophical texts I feel him being actively engaged in processes of translation between his languages of origin and French, in written and oral usage, into a highly personal French idiom.
So my preference for calling him a European philosopher actually arises from my wish to see Europe becoming not only a transnational community of sorts, but also, and possibly in the first place, a translational one – as it is de facto, be it with rather heavy growing pains, already in Brussels. A culture in which a number of languages may flourish around three central ones: French, German and English, with my own Dutch as a natural go-between amidst its neighbouring countries. A unity in active diversity and, as it happens, a reverse development seems to be on the way in the United States, where at least one second language is striving for recognition…
In fact, this website is a small playground for experimenting with translationalism around levinassian philosophy, where we no doubt will find many more exciting examples of varying shades of meaning between languages, that in themselves seemed clear enough. A pioneering activity, in natural association with the pioneering style of "practicing philosophy' of Emmanuel Levinas.