Taking liberties : re-situating difficile liberte

Recent years have seen a growing appreciation of Emmanuel Levinas’s Difficile liberté (Difficult Freedom), first published in 1963 but read almost always in its 1976 revised form.1 A chief reason for its popularity is the work’s apostrophic, and therefore emotional and embedded, affirmation of the practical ideals of teaching and learning, relating to the survival and reinvigoration of Judaism in post-war Europe. This in turn helps the reader to envisage and translate the more complex meta-ethical moments from Levinas’s philosophical works Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity) and Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence), given in part that traces of the passage from the one to the other can be discerned for historical reasons in Difficile liberté.2 In general, the text’s intimate readings of political and personal circumstances, key writers, historical events some of which recall the Shoah, practical ethics associated with tolerance, or patience or freedom of speech, themselves underpinned by a given practice of Talmudic reading, can offer an inclusive and genial introduction to a philosophy that is difficult to access and even inapplicable in its absolutizations