We feature an article on the history and the present of the Oriental Institute’s library. With over 200,000 volumes (including periodicals andmanuscripts), it ranks among the largest libraries within theCzech Academy of Sciences. It is divided into the General Library, Chinese Lu Xun Library, Korean Library, Tibetan Library, and John King Fairbank Library. Its collections include mainly publications on the history, literatures, languages, religions, and cultures of the countries of Asia and Africa. The Chinese Lu Xun library holds a special collection of Chinese books (about 67,000 volumes). The Korean Library presently holds more than 3,500 volumes. Its older part is mostly of North Korean origin. Thanks to generous gifts from the Korea Foundation, its collections were considerably enriched with South Korean publications in 1996 and 1997. and Jan Luffer a Veronika Danešová.
It is clear that Levinas’s critique of the dominance within Western philosophy of the concept of totality in Totality and Infinity was intended as a response to totalitarian-ism, but the extent to which this determines the organization of the book and the way in which this takes place has been largely misconceived. This is because of the failure to take seriously the opening question of whether or not we are duped by morality. The ethical resistance of the face of the Other does not adequately address that question until morality is secured against the challenge issued by a philosophy that equates being with war and that takes place only through the account of the infinite time of fecundity. Fecundity concretized in the family is the site of resistance to the totalitarian tendencies of any state that seeks for the sake of its preservation to legislate procreation. Hence fecundity and Eros are “beyond the face.” This reading draws on the important role given to fecundity in Time and the Other as well as the texts newly available in the first three volumes of Levinas’s Oeuvres.
In this issue, we feature two articles on the 120th anniversary of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Arts. The first, written by Luboš Velek, director of the Masaryk Institute and Archives, describes several predecessors of the ASCR. In his article, Antonín Kostlán of the Institute of the Contemporary History focuses on the origin and development of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (1952-1992), which comprised research institutes, a learned society and a body of academicians and corresponding members. and Antonín Kostlán.