Lévinas, transhumances entre le religieux et le philosophique pour une éthique de l’altérité

Abstract

The reception of Lévinas’ work, compound of philosophic and talmudic texts, is characterized – for the most part of the readers – by a confusion of the textual kinds. As long as Lévinas will be suspected of promoting the Jewish religion, his ethics of the otherness will not be established in a republican and laic French school which banishes, rightly, any religious proselytism. This contribution resorts to the theory of the text to identify the textual characteristics of the work, raise the misunderstandings, understand the possible “textual schizophrenia” of the author and the regulations between the fundamental of the same radical questioning. If the talmudic textual practices are considered as sending back to the religious order, the real opposition appears then between sacred magico-mythical archaic and a rationality come from the Judeo-Christian metaphysical base which establishes the philosophic transcendence between the Same and the Other. Transfer this rare and precious resource for an educational ethics of the Other, although delicate to assert in plural context, deserve this trans-textual passage on the borders of the textual orders of symbolism.

Keywords

• reception of Lévinas
• philosophic text
• theological text
• textual transhumance
• ethics of the otherness
• laïc morality