THE PHILOSOPHY OF VLADIMIR JANKÉLÉVITCH

Spring 1996
Volume 22, Number 3

Vladimir Jankélévitch was one of the most singular voices of twentieth-century French philosophy. Although he exerted an extraordinary influence on several generations of French philosophers, writers, and students, his name is, unfortunately, barely known in the English-speaking world. Virtually none of his vast oeuvre, comprising dozens of volumes of philosophy and of writings about music, has been translated into English, and histories of twentieth-century French philosophy have had great difficulty knowing how to situate him within the now-standard categories of classification. Neither Marxist, existentialist, nor structuralist, the translation of Jankélévitch's works has perhaps also been slowed by his inimitable style of writing, his invention of a vocabulary, and a rhythm of prose whose texture is a perpetual challenge for any translator to try to capture. Anyone who could entitle one of his books Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien is not your everyday academic philosopher, even by European standards. As difficult as it is, his prose is not obscure, its difficulty being produced, in the first instance, by its radical newness, its spontaneity and freshness, rather than by any abstruseness. Jankélévitch's voice, unmistakably recognizable in his writing, left an indelible mark on his students and colleagues, so that, as Emmanuel Levinas describes it, one always remembered a speech that was "a little breathless, in which, in the perfect clarity of the statement, each word sprang up new, as if unforeseeable in that which preceded it"--a "poetic thought" that for all of its musicality was no less conceptually rigorous as philosophy.1

In trying to introduce Jankélévitch, to give a sense of his philosophical distinctiveness, we have decided to include a very short essay "Do Not Listen to What They Say, Look at What They Do," written in homage to Henri Bergson. Jankélévitch, like many philosophers of his generation, was profoundly affected by Bergson, and his book Henri Bergson remains today one of the most significant works about Bergson in addition to representing a formative moment in Jankélévitch's own intellectual development.

No questions posed in his lifetime were more pressing for Jankélévitch than the questions addressed in "Should We Pardon Them?" Written against the placement of any statutory limitations on Nazi war crimes, this text, whose severeness created difficulties even for many of Jankélévitch's closest colleagues, has been the subject of recurrent debate in France and throughout Europe. Why publish it here, now, fifty-one years after the end of the Second World War? These remarks, with all of their starkness, still constitute one of the most morally powerful texts ever written about Nazi atrocities, a permanent contribution, the equal of unequaled works like Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved. Its philosophical force, and the questions one confronts in reading it, are no less vivid today than they were when it was first published. Moreover, Jankélévitch gives a philosophical analysis of the notion of crimes against humanity, developing the concepts of a metaphysical crime and of ontological wickedness, whose acuity has not yet been surpassed. His invocation of the associated ideas of moral monstrosity and perversity, of a work of hatred, of the emotion of horror, of the inexpiable, and his discussion of the moral status and foundation of pardon represent a contribution to moral philosophy as it should be practiced, a contribution that ought not to be overlooked as if somehow outdated by the circumstances under which Jankélévitch wrote.

Vladimir Jankélévitch's philosophical work will continue to survive the changing climate of philosophy, and I hope that his publication in these pages will be but the beginning of his English-speaking life.

1. Emmanuel Levinas, "Vladimir Jankélévitch," Hors suject (Paris, 1987), p. 125.