Having gained a first degree in 1927, Levinas began preparing his doctoral thesis, The Theory of Intuition in the Phenomenology of Husserl. Over the next two years, he spent time in Freiburg and was received by the patriarch, Husserl, whose courses he followed. On the recommendation of another professor, Martin Heidegger, who had just published Being and Time and who was not yet forty, he was also selected by Strasbourg to participate in the second Franco-German meetings at Davos, from March 17 to April 6, 1929. There he was present at the famous and decisive disagreement over Kant between Cassirer and Heidegger; the latter was moving toward the deconstruction of metaphysics that he had begun two years earlier. In the debate between the two German philosophers, Levinas had chosen his side. All those who knew him at the time describe his enthusiasm for a phenomenology that, he would later say, was reawakening the verbality and the event-quality of Being.1 During the stay in Davos, his first article on Husserl appeared, in the Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger. On May 4, 1929, back in Strasbourg, the young philosopher was invited with his friends Blanchot, Rontchewski, Madeleine Guéry, and Suzanne Pentillas to the house of Professor Blondel (several photographs, today well known, remain of the students’ departure by car on this occasion).
While Blanchot introduced his friend to the work of Proust and Valéry, and to a certain French mindset (esprit), Levinas gave him access to Russian literature (Dostoevsky, whom he preferred), as well as to German phenomenology. Blanchot wrote:
Thanks to Emmanuel Levinas, without whom I could not have begun to understand Being and Time as early as 1927 or 1928, reading that book provoked a true intellectual shock within me. An event of primary importance had just occurred: impossible to attenuate it, even today, even in my memory.2
And:
As soon as I met Emmanuel Levinas, more than fifty years ago—a happy meeting, in the strongest sense—it was through a sort of manifest obviousness that I persuaded myself that philosophy was life itself, youth itself, in its unbound passion, yet reasonable nonetheless, renewing itself continually and suddenly by the brilliance of entirely new, enigmatic thoughts.3
This presence of life in philosophy, and of philosophy in life, first experienced in the enthusiasm of an apprenticeship with the professors of Strasbourg, now became manifest in the radicality of phenomenological discovery. Levinas recounts how, reading first of all Husserl in 1927, he felt that he had
not come up with another unknown speculative construction, but with new possibilities for thought, with a new possibility of passing from one idea to another, of bypassing deduction, induction, and dialectics: the feeling of having come up with a new way of unfolding “concepts,” above and beyond Bergson’s appeal for inspiration in “intuition.”
He directed his eagerness and devotion to this feeling of giving life to the object by making it visible through the intentionality of consciousness. Here was the capacity to unfurl a new gaze over things, to make an event visible, to remove all power of fascination from the distribution of things in the world: Blanchot’s eye, as one can imagine, was receptive to this sharp approach. The rarity of his approach was thus inscribed in an impossible, critical admixture of rationalism, idealism, and phenomenology. Through “this new attentiveness to the secrets or the blind spots of consciousness which, beyond the psychological or the objective, reveals the sense of objectivity or of Being,” his novelistic aesthetic emerges.4
This is not to say that Levinas’s entire philosophy and Blanchot’s entire literature were already decided, or fundamentally oriented in one direction, during this student era in Strasbourg. The two men’s critical training merely opened a pathway for them. The composition of Thomas the Obscure began three years after Davos. Reelaborated, discussed, tested, the notions that owe much to this debate, such as those of origin, solitude, work, neuter, as well as the questioning on death, truth and errancy, revelation and dissimulation, would direct the aesthetic reflections of The Work of Fire and The Space of Literature. In Blanchot’s text, “the accent with which the word Being is proffered is Heideggerian,” Levinas would write.5 Blanchot, too, would discover existence with Husserl and Heidegger. His critical work cannot be conceived outside “the radical idea of intentionality,” an idea that is nonetheless “removed from the logic of objectification.”6 The presence of consciousness in all its manifestations, be they paradoxical ones such as sleep, dream, or the passivity of insomnia, is as radical in Husserl’s reasoning as it is in Blanchot’s narration, even if it is less certain in the latter that this proximity of consciousness to the world remains a proximity to itself (Freud and Bataille’s contributions consisted perhaps in introducing a split at the heart of this certainty, while that of Nietzsche was to make this newness or initialness of the event take on the disconcerting status of a return). However, the notion that the phenomenological reduction should also be an astonishment before the world, or that the vivacity of presence should be irreducible to knowledge’s maneuvering, opens a breach that would stimulate Levinas and Blanchot, like a point of obscure but possible radiance, a breach into which they would plunge, always with and through their language.7
The dialogue between the two friends is woven together by the fact that, in place of the assurance of Heidegger’s es gibt Levinas places the ubiquity of the there is and Blanchot hears the presence of the neuter. They would quote each other often on this point, this “density of the void,” this “murmur of silence”; “something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to one’s ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise.”8 As early as 1947, in From Existence to Existents, Levinas refers his readers to the first pages of Thomas the Obscure and their pure description of the there is: “the presence of absence, the night, the dissolution of the subject in the night, the horror of being, the return of being to the heart of every negative movement, the reality of unreality are admirably expressed there.”9 Levinas would always situate this notion on the boundaries of literature and philosophy, seeing it as both more abstract than the concept of Being, in which it provokes a crisis (to this extent following, in its own way, Heidegger’s initial interrogations in Being and Time), and as more concrete, infinitely stimulating the senses, drawing on a dynamic passivity which pushes back the limits of perception and places that perception contrariwise to all possible philosophies and phenomenologies, at once guarantee and threat, resource and perdition. A paradoxical edge to discourse, this proto-deconstructive notion was inscribed in a long tradition featuring—each in its own way but each time as the margin of the sensory or the perceptible—Parmenides’s non-Being, Heraclitus’s becoming, Hegel’s sacred, or Bataille’s impossible. It is at this limit of ontology that Levinas would like to hypostatize the concepts authorizing the primacy of ethics. Blanchot would attempt to write a new, poetic prose responding to this uneasy strength, thus discovering a hitherto unarticulated sensory space. Without there being any possibility of chronologically or genetically analyzing the intimate discussions that took place between the two men, we understand that the there is imposes itself on their madness like a shared discovery. It imposes itself on the madness of their belief, dramatizing it: “Rather than to a God, the notion of the there is leads us to the absence of God, the absence of any being.” It imposes itself on the madness of their childhood, that of the “primal scenes” from which it appears: “the there is . . . goes back to one of those strange obsessions that we retain from childhood and which reappear in insomnia when silence is resonating and the void is filled,” Levinas confides, before adding: “my reflection on this subject starts with childhood memories. One sleeps alone, the adults continue life; the child feels the silence of his bedroom as ‘rumbling.’ ”10 Sharing in this way must have been one more reason to seal their friendship, a friendship based in experience and based in literature (Levinas refers to Shakespeare and Rimbaud), a community of language (their titles and their notions echo one another, they quote one another anonymously, they pay public homage to one another).
This community of language still remains to be thought. Most commentaries proceed in the same direction: they start from Levinas’s philosophy and lead to Blanchot’s critical or narrative experience, as if the relation between the two consisted entirely in one fulfilling an apprenticeship in the other’s thought, as if thought somehow had to take precedence over its own gestation in experience. Is it really possible to state so categorically that “Blanchot thinks beginning from the space of literature” and “Levinas thinks beginning from the space of philosophy”?11 It seems that the Strasbourg experience served as a crucible, an origin, one that would always be at work in the two friends’ creative endeavors, and that would make their modes of thinking responsive ones, alive to sensation, interlaced with one another by a fascination with what escapes them, drawing on experiences that were at once singular and stripped bare, and leading to commentaries that were at once untiring and impatient. The engagement of these responsive modes of thinking with extreme literature on the one hand, and with the Bible or the Talmud on the other, does not stem from any opposition of literature to philosophy, but simply from a diverging of paths.
A year after Davos, on April 4, 1930, having definitively returned from Freiburg, Levinas defended his doctoral thesis with Maurice Pradines as examiner. The thesis was published almost immediately. Armed with his doctorate, he then left for Paris where he took a post as a modest supervisor at the Alliance Israélite Universelle, where he would spend thirty-three years of his life. In 1931, he was naturalized as a French citizen, and his translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations appeared, which had been produced in collaboration with Gabrielle Peiffer, a thinker discovered by Alexandre Koyré and Henri Gouhier. Levinas’s exceptionally friendly relations with Blanchot would remain of a rare quality, but the two would meet less and less, the frequent and even daily rhythm of earlier years having been definitively broken. The distinct ways in which their thinking developed had both the grace of imminence and the necessity of separation, taking place as this did under the gaze of the other. These gazes were so lacking in glib benevolence or negation that they recall a complicit freedom continually brought back into play, without demands or priorities, but with excessive gentleness, and which the tolerance of that excess would reshape.