Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch On What Cannot be Touched Edited by Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. 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Printed in the United States of America 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 ix