“To restitute a New Privilege to the Inner Life”: Emmanuel Levinas and the Experience of Captivity

The aim of my intervention is to analyse the relationship between Levinas’s experience of captivity—Levinas was captured with other members of the French 10th Army in the Somme region on 18 June 1940 and remained imprisoned until 18 April 1945—and the concept of ‘inner life’ which Levinas proposed to further examine and develop precisely during the period of captivity in the prisoners of war camps, which also included Jewish soldiers. A fundamental difference when compared to the testimonies of deportees to concentration and extermination camps. The reference texts, in addition to the Prison Notebooks, will be some of Levinas’ speeches from the first months following his return to France. The theoretical nuclei I will focus on, developed in direct relation to the experience of captivity, are those of precarity, dignity, freedom and Jewish identity.