Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch

Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch: On What Cannot Be Touched performs a cross-disciplinary theoretical analysis of the philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch. An international group of contributors, including both established and emerging scholars, engage with his writings from diverse disciplinary angles and consider his importance for contemporary political and cultural contexts. Edited by Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos, the collection provides a holistic and multi-perspectival approach to Jankélévitch’s writings, one that illuminates nuanced and complex connections across the five sub-fields of philosophy to which Jankélévitch contributed: moral philosophy, virtue theory, metaphysics, philosophy of music, and philosophy of religion. The book addresses different aspects of and problems in Jankélévitch’s philosophy, with all chapters unified by a preoccupation with the motif of intangibility—that which cannot be touched.

This timely volume provides the best and most expansive investigation of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s thought available in English. He was an author who always felt that he would be born posthumously. This book goes a long way to making that prediction a reality., This work masterfully treats many of Jankélévitch’s important concepts and arguments, including the possibility of forgiveness, remorse, love, humility, virtue, the almost-nothing, and the je-ne-sais-quoi. The work carried out in this volume will pave the way for further study and engaged discussion of Jankélévitch’s timely, singular, and creative philosophy., A necessary and challenging work, La Caze and Zolkos’ collection renews attention not only on Jankélévitch as a key French philosopher who wrote `for the twenty-first century,’ but also on France’s subsequent `moral development’ after the Holocaust. The essays move beyond their philosophical foci to suggest that the political and ethical elements of Jankélévitch’s thought in relation to modernity, fraught as it is with the reemergence of fascism, race hatred, and Anti-Semitism, are intimately tied to conclusions Jankélévitch drew from his Holocaust experience. La Caze and Zolkos present Jankélévitch’s work as a case study on how to shift the valence of `forgiveness’ to account for the `homelessness’ of the Jewish philosopher, on how to link the philosophical to the ethical., A beloved professor at the Sorbonne, well-known in the musical and intellectual circles of his time, Vladimir Jankélévitch nonetheless felt himself to be an outsider to twentieth-century French philosophy. This collection makes the case that he is uniquely a philosopher for our times. With important essays that span the wide range of Jankélévitch’s writings on remorse, forgiveness, love, death, music, metaphysics, and ethics, this volume will reward readers new to his philosophy and sharpen our sense of the philosophical and artistic legacy of a truly original thinker.

Marguerite La Caze is associate professor in philosophy at the University of Queensland.Magdalena Zolkos is Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University in Frankfurt.