Abstract
Traditional empiricism, the stout defender of the senses, is by all accounts sick. But perhaps a certain empiricist legacy is still fighting for life. Without seeking a resurrection of empiricism, the aim of this paper is to engage in what Levinas calls a ‘rehabilitation of sensation’. I want to resist theorizations of our life that would seek to exclude our sensible relations with things and with others from any intrinsic involvement with our understanding of them; to resist conceptions that regard sensibility as something in itself dumb and brute, something (as tradition would have us have it) ‘merely animal’. However, the trajectory of this discussion will not remain in every part faithful to its Levinasian inspiration. And it will not leave the traditional conception of animality intact either. In what follows, what my five-year-old daughter calls our ‘humanality’ will not be elaborated in terms of (trans)formations of life that Levinas, with the tradition, calls a ‘break’ from ‘animality’ or from ‘the animal condition’. Every other, I want to affirm, is every bit an animal.
Published Version
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