Conversations with Emmanuel Lévinas, 1983-1994

ncluded here as well, following the interviews, are several essays in which Saint Cheron presents his own further considerations of their conversations and Levinas's ideas. He writes of the relation of the epiphany of the face to the idea of holiness; of Sartre and, in particular, that existentialist thinker's "revision" of Jews and Judaism in his final controversial dialogues with Benny Lévy; of the epiphanies of death in André Malraux's writings; and of the radical breach effected in the Western philosophical tradition by Levinas's "otherwise-than-thinking." Finally, Saint Cheron pays homage to Levinas's talmudic readings in an analysis of forgiveness and the unforgivable in Jewish tradition and liturgy, culminating in an inevitable confrontation with the Shoah from the perspective of Simon Wiesenthal's harrowing The Sunflower and some of the contemporary reactions to it."