. Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality

Abstract

Whilst there is evident potential in Levinas's philosophy for theorising the passage from ethics to politics in the quest to secure an ethico -political rather than a purely political sublation of the theory/praxis dichotomy, there are also various stumbling blocks that immediately come to mind. It is problematic in the philosophically technical sense described by Badiou, as noted in the previous chapter. He argues that the ethico-political cannot be deduced from an ethics of alterity at all as ‘the other always resembles me too much'. But Levinas's political discourse is problematic (at least for many of his readers) in more straightforward ways: for instance, Simon Critchley and Tina Chanter have both argued that his politics are, overall, worryingly conservative, especially in relation to the family, in relation to gender and sexual difference. And Howard Caygill has presented a sharp critique of the complexity of Levinas's relationship to ‘Israel’ (that is both sacred Israel, and the militarised state of Israel) thereby highlighting the essential shortcomings of what might be described as the growing body of Levinas criticism which all too simply attempts to appropriate from his philosophy a blithe ‘angelicism’ vis-a-vis the alterity of the Other. I will return to comment on Caygill's position at the end of this chapter, but before I do, I shall establish the key features of my own reading of Levinas's account of the ethical Subject, as I believe it will offer a new perspective on all of these issues.