Table Of ContentContemporary
Perspectives on Vladimir
Jankélévitch
Contemporary
Perspectives on Vladimir
Jankélévitch
On What Cannot be Touched
Edited by
Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: That Which Cannot Be Touched: Introduction to
Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch ix
Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos
1 The Metaphysics of Love and the Theory of Forgiveness
in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy 1
Giulia Maniezzi
2 Paradoxes of Virtue in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Moral Philosophy 19
José Manuel Beato
3 “I can’t beat it”: Dimensions of the Bad Conscience in
Manchester by the Sea 39
Marguerite La Caze
4 An Enduring Audience: Jankélévitch and Plotinus 57
Tim Flanagan
5 Speaking in the Night: On the Non-Sense of Death and Life 75
Aaron T. Looney
6 Vladimir Jankélévitch’s “Diseases of Temporality” and
Their Impact on Reconciliatory Processes 95
Francesco Ferrari
7 Jankélévitch’s Metaphysics of Humility 117
Andrew Kelley
v
vi Contents
8 The Work of Remorse: Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Conception
of the Ethical Subject and François Ozon’s Frantz 137
Magdalena Zolkos
9 The Philosophy of the Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi and the Possibility
of a Nonreligious Spirituality 157
Clovis Salgado Gontijo
10 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, and the Emergence
of a Musical Aesthetic 177
Paul Atkinson
Index 197
Notes on Contributors 209
Acknowledgments
This project began from our mutual admiration for Vladimir Jankélévitch’s
beautiful and intensely rich philosophical texts, which we wanted to help
find a wider readership to enjoy reading and researching. Recent translations
of his works into English made this goal more realistic and we were lucky
to discover a group of like-minded thinkers, who encouraged us through
the project, including Peter Banki, Richard College, Angelee Joy Contini,
Damian Cox, Elese Dowden, Robyn Horner, Alexandre Lefebvre, Diane Per-
pich, Françoise Schwab, and Cindy Zeiher, so we would like to warmly thank
them. We are grateful to all the contributors, Clovis Salgado Gontijo, Andrew
Kelley, José Manuel Beato, Giulia Maniezzi, Paul Atkinson, Tim Flanagan,
Aaron Looney, Francesco Ferrari, who wrote such wonderful essays and were
so patient with and responsive to our editing.
We appreciate the financial, institutional, and administrative support for
this project given by Paula Gleeson, Lisa Tarantino, and Nikolas Kompridis
at the Institute of Social Justice at the Australian Catholic University. We
would also like to recognize Jana Hodges-Kluck and Trevor Crowell at Lex-
ington for their enthusiasm about Jankélévitch’s work and publication of this
collection.
Finally, we would also like to acknowledge each other as co-editors—it
has been an honor and pleasure to work together and to support each other in
this at times challenging, but also deeply satisfying endeavor.
Marguerite La Caze
Magdalena Zolkos
vii
Introduction
That Which Cannot Be Touched:
Introduction to Contemporary
Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch
Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos
The philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985) presents its students
with the following puzzle, or, using Jankélévitch’s own terminology, we
should rather say “secret”: despite the richness and originality of his ideas
in the fields of moral philosophy, virtue ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of
music and philosophy of religion, and despite his perspicacious interpretative
engagements with the canonical texts of the Western philosophical tradition
and the interlocutions with his contemporaries, Jankélévitch has remained at
the margins of twentieth century French philosophy—his thought unclassifi-
able within any of its major movements, and his intellectual and political alle-
giances, including Plotinus, Schelling, and Bergson—multiple and diverse.1
He was an accomplished author and a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne
for over two decades, very much admired by his students, but he also felt
isolated within the compartmentalized world of French academic philosophy.
To his contemporaries Jankélévitch was, as Goddard puts it, a “source of
endless surprise” and “a champion of nonconformity.”2 Perhaps nowhere had
Jankélévitch’s nonconformity become as apparent as in his decision—follow-
ing German Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, during which he was
prevented from teaching because of his Jewish background—to disengage
entirely from German culture and philosophy in his academic writings and
in his public engagements. This also included a systematic removal of refer-
ences to German philosophy from his own pre-war writings, as in the case of
the 1951 revisions of La Mauvaise Conscience, originally published in 1933.3
In the introduction to the English translation of Le Pardon, its transla-
tor Andrew Kelley cites Jankélévitch’s words, expressing a feeling of
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