Michael Portal

Maurice Blanchot’s “The Strange and the Stranger” (1958) is an essential text for understanding Blanchot’s thought, its development, and its enduring importance. He presents an early account of the impersonal “neuter” in subject-less experiences like “alienation,” “alteration,” “dispersion,” “disappearance,” and “absence.” These experiences of strangeness threaten thought, which is only “itself and for-itself its own experience.” Relatedly, they also reveal “the neutrality of being or neutrality as being.” With reference to both Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, Blanchot clarifies the meaning and exigency of a neuter that can take “upon itself the reality of alienation.”

The following is an early, previously untranslated essay by Emmanuel Levinas concerning “the metaphysics of antisemitism.” This essay, published originally in 1938 for Paix et Droit, concerns the shared history and destiny of Jews and Christians, religious groups who maintain a relation of essential “foreignness” to, and so “do not belong” to, the “pagan” world. Levinas distinguishes between the long history of Jewish-Christian antagonism and the newer Nazi-style antisemitism, a particularly insidious “racism” that threatens both Jews and Christians. Levinas calls for a renewed appreciation of the “vocation” common to Jews and Christians to advance Judeo-Christian “solidarity,” a solidarity that Levinas believes is increasingly necessary.

The following is an early, previously untranslated essay by Emmanuel Levinas concerning “the metaphysics of antisemitism.” This essay, published originally in 1938 for Paix et Droit, concerns the shared history and destiny of Jews and Christians, religious groups who maintain a relation of essential “foreignness” to, and so “do not belong” to, the “pagan” world. Levinas distinguishes between the long history of Jewish-Christian antagonism and the newer Nazi-style antisemitism, a particularly insidious “racism” that threatens both Jews and Christians. Levinas calls for a renewed appreciation of the “vocation” common to Jews and Christians to advance Judeo-Christian “solidarity,” a solidarity that Levinas believes is increasingly necessary.

ABSTRACT Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s Time in Exile illuminates being in “gerundive time.” The gerundive tense (which is similar to the infinitive tense in English) captures how our being is always already “suspended” between worlds and meanings—how our being is a “non-final verb.” Schuback considers such existence in the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Clarice Lispector. Of the three thinkers, Lispector’s writing best reveals how existence (especially existence in exile) is an “immense struggle for presence.” Schuback’s hope is that we may find a home in our homelessness.