No thinker seems further removed from our current preoccupations than Lev Shestov, the Russian-Jewish émigré who, in the 1920s and 1930s, surprised the Parisian elite with his untimely work. But it is perhaps Shestov's untimeliness that makes him our contemporary. Our humanity is facing what seems to be an inevitable process of self-destruction: ongoing climate catastrophe, nuclear threat, pandemics, economic collapse and, finally, the replacement of cognitive work by artificial intelligence.
In the infernal asymptote that brings us closer to Catastrophe, we can turn to the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, Horkheimer, Arendt or Günther Anders. But Lev Shestov's anti-philosophy, in contrast to that of the twentieth-century Marxists, opens up an original way of thinking about what's to come. In a very different way, Emmanuel Levinas's critique of ontology and philosophies of totality, from the 1930s onwards, finds an echo at a time when the urgent critique of the Enlightenment in the age of the Anthropocene is taking hold.
And yet, one has to wonder whether we need enemies of reason in an age of conspiracism, irrationalism and “post-truth.” Unless it is reason itself that inevitably leads us to the Catastrophe. I will probe Shestov's trial of Athens and the Logos in light of the history of nihilism proposed by contemporary philosopher Jean Vioulac, a nihilism which, for Vioulac, begins with the Greek denial of the concrete and ends in the devastated world of the Anthropocene. As for Levinas, if his thought has also attempted to rebuild a common world beyond ontology, it is neither through faith or through the irrational, but through an ethics of the inter-human.
Bruno Chaouat is Professor of French and Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is a Honorary Fellow at the Center for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society and Politics, Durham University, UK, and Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. After publishing on the French romantic writer Francois-René de Chateaubriand, and especially on the question of autobiography, experience and death (Je meurs par morceaux. Chateaubriand, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999), he focussed his research on testimony and Holocaust studies. He has published numerous articles in France and the US on authors such as Jorge Semprun, Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, Patrick Modiano, Jean Genet, Richard Millet, Albert Memmi, etc. He has edited several volumes and conference proceedings (Penser la terreur, 2009; Lire, écrire la honte, 2003). He also dedicated a book to French thought in the aftermath of the Cold War (L’Ombre pour la proie, 2012). More recently he published a book on French responses to the resurgence of antisemitism, and the relations between postmodern thought and those responses (Is Theory Good for the Jews? French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism, Liverpool University Press, 2016). His book appeared last year in a German translation. His newest book, Out of This World: Gnostic Encounters in French Literature and Thought (Liverpool University Press, 2024), explores the uncanny echoes of ancient gnostic themes in French modernity. He is currently working on the Russian emigres in interwar Paris and their impact on the renewal of French thought.
Thursday, April 3 @ 5:00-6:30pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley campus
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Co-sponsors: Center for Jewish Studies; Berkeley Antisemitism Education Initiative; Department of French