Harvard Divinity School, Swartz Hall, James Room
Elad Lapidot | “Emmanuel Levinas and Decolonial Jewish Thought”
This talk reflects on the relations between post-Holocaust Jewish thought and decolonial thought through the work of French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Recently, thinkers criticized Levinas for his Eurocentrism. The talk argues that Levinas anticipated this critique and from the 1960s on sought to develop the foundations for decolonial Jewish thought – and for decolonial Zionism. To demonstrate this claim, Lapidot’s talk offers an innovative presentation of Levinas’s entire intellectual project as articulated around a fundamental turn between the period prior to 1968 and the post-68 period. The turn relates to Levinas’s understanding of the relationship between Judaism and Western civilization. It shows how, prior to 1968, Levinas considered the historical Jewish collective, Israel, as the avant-garde of Western humanism. After 1968, and the rise of decolonial discourse, Levinas’s Israel shifts roles and becomes the paradigmatic victim of Western imperialism.
Elad Lapidot is Professor for Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. Holding a PhD in philosophy from the Paris Sorbonne university, he has taught philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud at many universities, such as the University of Bern, Switzerland, and the Humboldt Universität and Freie Univeristät in Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2025), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary (with R. Bar) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010).
This event is co-sponsored with Harvard Divinity School.