Hagi Kenaan teaches philosophy at Tel-Aviv University. In addition to studies in phenomenology, aesthetics and the philosophy of art, he is the author of The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics as an Optics (Tel-Aviv, 2008).Ilit Ferber is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Tel-Aviv University. She has published articles on Benjamin, Freud, Brecht and Herder. She recently completed a book manuscript entitled Melancholy and Philosophy: Walter Benjamin’s Early Writings , and her current research deals with the relationship between pain and theories of the origin of language in Rousseau, Herder, Freud, Benjamin and Wittgenstein.