You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
If the twentieth century was marked by the mass destruction of European Jewry, it was also a period in which the impact of some of these Jews, preceding or surviving the Holocaust/Shoah, was immense. Sigmund Freud was exemplary in this respect: no one doubts the lasting effect of his thought, even if its scientific accuracy, therapeutic efficacy and political and social acuity might be contested. The vision of human life that he offered, with its emphasis both on those forces that operate on us ‘unconsciously’ and on the complex interchanges this produces with society (or ‘civilization’), is one that has permeated many cultures, especially in Europe and the Americas, but elsewhere too. Its core feature is to demonstrate that the questions surrounding what it means to live a ‘good life’ are only answerable from within the context of awareness that psychosocial integrity is precarious, being constructed out of an encounter between what we do not know about ourselves ‘internally’ and what we cannot control in the social world.
If Freud is a central figure, however ambivalently received, in twentieth-century culture and a continuing shadow, however distorted, in the twenty-first century, Emmanuel Levinas is more marginal, known mainly to philosophers and much less visible in wider academic spheres and certainly so in popular culture. Yet the issues with which Levinas engaged were of crucial significance in the post-Shoah period. These focused on the construction of an understanding of ethics as ‘first philosophy’, which loosely put means articulating how ethical relationality is the condition for human subjecthood and opposing the ‘ego-centred’ philosophies that not only dominated European philosophy but also could be said to have helped lay the ground - or at least confuse the response to - totalitarianism and Nazism. Heidegger is the principal example here, someone who (as Valerie Ovid Giovanini notes in passing) Levinas regarded as unforgiveable for his engagement wit