Elad Lapidot, "State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel" (Indiana UP, 2025)

July 21, 2026

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5 min read

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most celebrated philosophers of the 20th century, known for placing ethics—specifically, an infinite responsibility toward the "other person"—at the center of his thought. Yet, as Elad Lapidot argues in State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel, this familiar portrait is incomplete. Lapidot’s reading reveals a thinker split between two identities—French philosopher and Jewish thinker—whose work stages a hidden drama between Western philosophy and Jewish thought. More provocatively, he claims that Levinas’s project underwent a radical self-critique around 1967–68, shifting from a colonial justification of the Jewish state to a decolonial vision of Israel as a perpetual victim and martyr. The book is not merely an interpretation of Levinas but an attempt to rethink the political stakes of Jewish thought today.

The Two Levinases: Philosopher and Jewish Thinker

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What you'll learn

1 (01:35) **Guest & Host Introductions** - Emir Engel (Hebrew University) introduces Elad Lapidot (University of Lille), author of *State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel*.
2 (04:44) **Who is Levinas? The Philosopher of the Other** - Lapidot explains Levinas as both a major European philosopher (ethics of responsibility toward the other) and a canonical Jewish thinker.
3 (08:03) **Totality and Infinity: The Two Epistemes** - Overview of Levinas's 1961 masterwork as a staging of the conflict between Western philosophy (totality) and Jewish thought (infinity).
4 (12:28) **The Drama of the Subject** - The phenomenological core: the individual subject is constituted through an ethical relation to the other, not through cognition or existential engagement.
5 (23:10) **Decoding the Project: Philosophy Meets Jewish Thought** - Lapidot argues Levinas's phenomenological works must be read alongside his Jewish writings to understand the full political-historical drama.
6 (32:53) **The Third Force: Hitlerism and the Pagan Threat** - Levinas posits a third, more dangerous power beyond totality and infinity: a pagan, Germanic force (Hitlerism) that rejects all transcendence.
7 (37:47) **The Turn: From *Totality and Infinity* to *Otherwise Than Being*** - Lapidot identifies a real break around 1967/68, not just development but self-critique.

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Show Notes

Elad Lapidot is Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Indiana UP, forthcoming), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation of Hegel’sPhänomenologie des Geistes (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logique de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010).

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