Emmanuel Lévinas' Barbarisms: Adventures of Eastern Talmudic Counter-Narratives Heterodoxly Encountering the South

This dissertation examines the scope and limitations of the re-appropriation of the term barbarism by modern Jewish intellectuals in conversation with Third World social movements. Emmanuel Lévinas is my paradigmatic example of this re-appropriation, as his Talmudic interpretations illuminate this process, and his work is located on the axis of the encounter between Jewish and decolonial thinking. I contend that Lévinas follows a classic line of modern European interpreters who expressed their discomfort with the description of the Jewish people as barbaric. While this discomfort can be traced within this orthodox interpretation of Lévinas, I argue that his particular solution for the problem can only be explained by a more heterodox exploration. Lévinas’ positive re-appropriation of the term is part of contextual conversations that he sustained with other peoples characterized as barbarians (i.e. Third World decolonial theorists). While this re-appropriation was originally conceived in order to establish an East-East revolutionary conversation between Eastern European rabbinical interpreters and other radical Eastern projects (i.e. Maghrebi Marxism) it became an East-South decolonial conversation between Jewish and Afro-Caribbean/Latino-American intellectuals. This conversation, however, ultimately challenges the apologetic Jewish re-appropriation of exteriority in the concert of multiple barbarians. I explore the limitations of Jewish thought to engage with this community and cross from an apologetic to a critical barbarism. \n\nThis dissertation, in conclusion, seeks to make an original contribution in the interrelation between Jewish and post-colonial studies. I aim to do so by first, demonstrating that the Jewish return to classical sources is historically and conceptually a decolonial counter-narrative that was influenced by (and in turn influenced) Third World discourses; second, explaining the reasons and consequences of the persistence of Jewish imagery and influences in Third World decolonial theory; third, exploring the limits of Jewish thinking and the benefits of the expansion of Jewish apologetical dialogues into barbaric critical conversations. And finally, challenging most contemporary scholarship in modern Jewish philosophy, which holds that Jewish thought and the modern re-reading of its sources can only be understood in the context of Western consciousness.

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