Almost reluctantly, it seemed, in 1948 the journal Les Temps Modernes published an article on art and truth by Emmanuel Levinas, the then relatively unknown young philosopher whose dissertation, La Théorie de l"intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (1930), had, as we now know, inspired Jean Paul Sartre to go to Germany to study with Husserl and Heidegger firsthand.¹ Not only is the article, entitled "La Réalité et son ombre," a significant document for the further reception of phenomenology in postwar France, as has been detailed by Bernhard Waldenfels,² it has a systematic relevance for contemporary debates on the relationship between art and truth.