Transcendence and the ConcreteJean Wahl (18881974), once considered by the likes of Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gabriel Marcel to be among the greatest French philosophers, has today nearly been forgotten outside France. Yet his influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. Levinas wrote that during over a half century of teaching and research, [Wahl] was the life force of the academic, extra academic, and even, to a degree anti