Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

Being with OthersLevinas and the Ethics of Autism Megan Craig This paper explores the relationship between Emmanuel Levinas's alterity ethics, autism, and play. Although Levinas never wrote about autism, he is known as the preeminent thinker of the "other" in the twentieth century, and he is a crucial source for conceiving of ethics as responsiveness to the irreducible difference of other human beings. Insofar as Levinas challenges us to respond to every other, his work provides valuable insights into the nature of responsibility and problematizes every attempt to draw a stark and static line of demarcation between neuro-typical and autistic persons. Levinas helps to show the urgency of thinking about autism from a perspective of respect for and responsibility to difference, highlighting the risks and rewards of being with others who challenge one's sense of self. It is less clear how one might reconcile Levinas, whose work is characterized by a sober, even traumatic, stress on responsibility, with play. And yet, Levinas's work includes significant, if under-examined, discussions of play (jouer) and enjoyment (jouissance) as they relate to living that should not be dismissed or relegated to an overly stark dichotomy between the serious and the playful. If we can hear the delicate resonances between playing and living in Levinas's work, they may open new areas of research and productively destabilize a caricature of Levinasian ethics as allergic to levity or joy. In what follows, I will argue that play is a crucial aspect of being together with other people and for honing a creative aptitude for solidarity. Play is particularly important for being with others who are nonverbal, as it allows for engagement and [End Page 305] exchange across multiple registers of sensation. In spite of the fact that a "lack of varied spontaneous pretend play or social imitative play" is one of the twelve diagnostic criteria for autism issued by the American Psychiatric Association (an autism diagnosis requires at least two signs from each of three different categories relating to social interaction, communication, and repetitive behaviors), first-person accounts of autism indicate a very different story with respect to capacities for imaginative play (American Psychiatric Association 1994, 70–71). For too long autistic individuals have been at the mercy of diagnostic rubrics that predetermine the very concepts they should explore. Part of what I want to suggest in this paper is that non-autistic individuals have everything to learn about what play means and how to play from the autistic, that is, from those who have historically been deemed the least adept at recognizable and normalized forms of play. Additionally, although Levinas has little to say about variable forms of play in his work, his alterity ethics foregrounds aspects of enjoyment, communication, and sensibility that relate intimately to play and its ethical implications. My work proceeds in four parts. The f irst section describes some of the personal history and basis for my interests in autism. I then turn to Levinas, providing a brief overview of his ethics and examining his concepts of "sense" and "language" to show that there are deep resources in his work for thinking about several issues crucial to autism. The third section of the paper brings Levinas's ethics into conversation with first-person accounts of autism and autistic experience, centered on Ron Suskind's 2014 memoir, Life, Animated, which chronicles the life of his autistic son, Owen—but also guided by other accounts from Naoki Higashida, Daniel Tammet, Wendy Lawson, and Donna Williams. Suskind's book helps to dislodge dominant theories of autistic individuals as incapable of play, and it makes a compelling case for rethinking the concepts of play and imagination as they relate not only to autism but to what it means to be with others and to be alive to the world. In the fourth and final section, I bring Levinas's alterity ethics together with play, suggesting some concrete ethical/political implications for early childhood education and long-term care that emerge from a Levinasian examination of autistic experience. I realize that Levinas is not helpful in all ways for thinking about autism, and, at first glance, much of his...

Thinking in Butler

The importance of Levinas's philosophy for education has been widely discussed. In ‘Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?’ however, Alistair Miller questions whether Levinas's work is of value at all, raising doubts about whether his philosophy can, in any way, be helpful when it comes to practical ethical decision-making, especially within education. Levinas's ethics, he argues, in the light of its lack of rational argument, amounts only to poetic imagery and mystical incantation. The purpose of this paper is to read Levinas in relation to education against this indictment by Miller. This paper proceeds by investigating the basis of Miller's arguments, in the light of exegesis of relevant aspects of Levinas's work. My purpose is not the positing of a new system or the formulation of systematic ideas of ethics but rather achieving an understanding of human experience, especially in contexts of teaching and learning, under a different, more accurate description. In doing so I attempt to show that Levinas's philosophy indeed provides a ground for ethics—that is, a means of understanding the practicality of ethics differently, beyond systematic approaches. In the last section, where education is discussed more directly, ethics will be seen as its very condition.

Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust and the Unjust Death, by Clifton R. Spargo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 311pp. $60.00. R. Clifton Spargo's Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death is perhaps the most erudite reading of Levinas have encountered to date. In this book, Spargo, a professor of English at Marquette University, asks us to reconsider Levinas s ethics precisely in the shadow of the Holocaust. Spargo's interest, however, is not the fact of the Holocaust per se. Rather, he focuses on the effects, the figure of the Holocaust, and in particular, the impact the memory of the Holocaust has on our understanding of ethics and our responsibility to our neighbors. Spargo's talent, in part, lies in his masterful etymological analysis and careful unpacking of Levinas's Christological vocabulary. Additionally, Spargo is able to read Levinas against himself productively. That is, he is able to demonstrate that even where Levinas's philosophy is at odds with itself one can nonetheless find evidence for the ethics of responsibility underlying this apparent inconsistency. Spargo's book is well organized into an introduction, four chapters, and an afterword. The introduction provides a broad but detailed description of the impact of French philosophy on American intellectual circles. It specifically lays the ground for situating Levinas's entry into the American intellectual/ philosophical scene, which coincided with a waning interest in deconstruction and a suspicion of deconstruction's sympathy for Nietzschean cynicism (ethics is fraudulent). Thus, the timing was right for Levinas's ethical project, which promoted a positive conception of responsibility. Chapter 1, Ethics as Unquieted Memory, explores the role of mourning in Levinas's project. Levinas's analysis of mourning, which necessarily focuses on the one who has died, marks the shift from a concern with ourselves to a preoccupation with the other. Chapter 2 explores bad conscience in both Nietzsche and Levinas, demonstrating that although Levinas does not make much mention of Nietzsche, there is nonetheless a substantive critique of Nietzsche that pervades Levinas's discussion of responsibility. Where the first two chapters are largely sympathetic to Levinas, chapters 3 and 4 are largely critical. Yet, it is precisely in this critique that Spargo reveals the power of Levinas's ethics. He explores the role of the memory of injustice in acknowledging our responsibility in present-day injustice and in addressoimg it accordingly-in short, in caring. Spargo's argument exposes an unacknowledged chain of causality that leads to each of us, implicating all of us in our present injustices. Having shown each of us, including Bill Why should care about the Mexicans? O'Reilly, to fit into this chain of responsibility (pp. 220-221), Spargo argues that this ethical responsibility is in fact the precursor to political responsibility and political action. The why should care; didn't do anything response of the many simply has no purchase. Spargo's argument is compelling, and his analysis is unique in that it draws political responsibility closer to Levinas's ethics than has heretofore been done. Nonetheless, this analysis assumes a Levinasian subject that is already willing to admit responsibility and say I am guilty. am not convinced that for some people they should care, even if the should is a logically or philosophically strong should, will translate into they do care. Yet, there is a space in Spargo's analysis in which we might find a path to follow. In a nuanced discussion regarding the possibility of viewing the Holocaust as a sign of international crisis (p. 184), Spargo refers to the manner in which democracies and others refused permission to Jewish refugees of Nazi occupied Europe to enter into their borders (p. …

dissertation examines the complex relationship between language, philosophy and Judaism in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) in light of previously unpublished writings of Levinas as well as research literature. It mainly thanks to the consideration of previously unpublished writings of Levinas, which appeared only recently in the first two volumes of the edition of his Completed Works, that the insights presented in this work have come about. These writings provide perspectives into the development of Levinas's philosophy. Further, results from international research literature, especially on the notion of the voice, have been extensively taken into consideration in order to analyze different aspects of the works of Levinas and Rosenzweig respectively and set them into relation to one another. work divided into three parts: - Judaism. first part (Chapter I) deals with the topic of Judaism. This plays a key role not only in Levinas's writings but also in his life. In this respect, the influence of Franz Rosenzweig, whose major work The Star of Redemption (1921) Levinas read in the mid-thirties, of crucial importance. emergence and development of this influence will first be discussed through an analysis of Levinas's early work. It examines to what extent the notion of Judaism as a category of being (categorie de l'etre), which appears in Levinas's captivity notebooks (Carnets de captivite) as well as in his articles on Rosenzweig after the war, can be seen as a result of his reception of Rosenzweig's writings and how this reception furthermore influenced Levinas's after the war. Finally, against the background of the different biographical and historical connections, this dissertation outlines the relationship between Judaism and philosophy in the work of Levinas with special reference to the influence of Rosenzweig. - Philosophy. second part (Chapter II) outlines the question of the role of philosophy. Firstly, the issue of death examined in relation to the notion of the there is (il y a), which Levinas elaborates upon especially in De l'existence de l'existant (1947). In this context the influence of Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) on Levinas plays a crucial role. aspect of death further linked to the notions of eros and creation in the works of Levinas and Rosenzweig. Furthermore, the thesis discusses the temporal mode of eschatology and its special significance for Levinas's thinking, particularly regarding the role of language in his philosophy. - Language. Part III (Chapter III and IV) primarily concerned with the topic of In chapter III the connection between language and speech-thinking (Sprach-Denken) in the work of Rosenzweig elaborated and related to the notion of language in Levinas. Based on Rosenzweig's article Das neue Denken (1925) the thesis analyzes what Rosenzweig actually meant by the notion of a new thinking (Neues Denken) and how it reflected in his theoretical and biographical works. Two aspects are emphasized in this analysis: language and revelation. close connection of these two aspects in the work of Rosenzweig then set in relation to their role in Levinas. Further, Rosenzweig's concept of a messianic epistemology and his notion of truth are examined. Finally, the role of language analyzed with respect to Rosenzweig's notion of truth. silence and the vision of the divine face, as Rosenzweig discusses in the third part of The Star of Redemption, are shown to be ultimately accorded a higher significance by Rosenzweig than language. phenomenon of the in the works of Levinas and Rosenzweig worked out in chapter IV. Firstly, the notion of the applied in order to develop a interpretation of the subject in Levinas's work. In a second step, the complex relationship between revelation, language and in Rosenzweig's work examined with special attention given to the role of the voice of love in The Star of Redemption. In this way, the crucial significance of the in the act of revelation outlined. This project demonstrates how the mute Self becomes a speaking soul and in which way the voice of love (Rosenzweig) plays a key role in this context. Each of these aspects related critically to Levinas's work. Lastly, the thesis demonstrates the significance of the in the translation of the Bible, which Rosenzweig undertook together with Buber in 1925. In conclusion, this interpretation of Levinas's and Rosenzweig's thought placed in the context of postmodern philosophy in order to make it fruitful for the present time.

It without saying that we owe it to Emmanuel Levinas to have ingeniously reconfigured phenomenology so as to let it finally reach the Other as saturated phenomenon.1 This is one of the few statements which Jean-Luc Marion acknowledges Emmanuel Levinas's tremendous influence upon his work. Generally, Marion's debt to Levinas quite literally goes without saying. In fact, his criticism of Levinas is usually much more explicit than any praise. Often one has the impression that Marion sees his own work as an attempt to surpass to overcome him, to finish off and complete what has been left open or undeveloped Levinas's work. At times Marion even makes such a move explicit, as when he cites himself as fourth line after Husserl, Heidegger, and each going further than the ones before him.2 One criticism is made particularly often by Marion and probably constitutes his most fundamental challenge to his teacher. Marion claims that Levinas's other is only a generic and universal other, not a unique and individuated one. Levinas cannot speak of the other as an individual because of his particular emphasis on ethics. Beyond Marion's specific criticism of Levinas's account of individuation, thus, is the claim that ethics is too confining and that one must move beyond ethics to love. True individuation of the other is possible only eros (or charity) not ethics. My purpose this essay is threefold: First, lay out Marion's criticism of Levinas and his arguments supporting it. Second, try to refute this criticism by showing that it involves a misreading of Levinas's project and several crucial passages of his work. Finally, consider the further move of love that Marion wants Levinas to make and briefly wonder whether love is indeed the only (or even the best) mode for individuation of the other. Individuation of the Other? Marion's claim regarding the lack of individuation Levinas is often made casually throughout his writings, as if he was merely stating a well-known fact about Levinas's work. Seldom does he take the pains to substantiate this rather startling criticism. Only two articles does he explicate his argument greater detail. first was an early article written in homage to Emmanuel Levinas, which was included Marion's work Prolegomena to Charity as the chapter The Intentionality of Love.3 A later article, D'autrui a l'individu, somewhat more generous to Levinas tone (though maybe not content, as we will see shortly), was published as part of Marion's edition of Levinas's Positivite et Transcendance conjunction with a conference on Levinas and phenomenology, which featured such speakers as Alain Renaut, Francoise Dastur, Jean Greisch, and Jean-Louis Chretien.4 will begin this section with a consideration of the earlier article order to make explicit Marion's argument and then go on to examine the later article to show how Marion further substantiates and also qualifies his earlier statements. This exposition will be supplemented with some of the more general remarks Marion's phenomenological work. In The Intentionality of Love, it is Marion's concern to develop a phenomenological description of love which love is able to transcend my lived experiences and my order to reach pure alterity (PC, 75). He overcomes what he calls amorous autism-the experience of loving which resides solely me not the other whom love and constitutes anything other always as a mere object-by an account of Levinas's ethics, which an invisible gaze is directed at me. do not reach the other through my own consciousness, but rather by feeling another stream of directed against me that threatens to turn me into one of its objects: I do not reach the other by means of the have of him; he forces himself upon me by means of the unconsciousness to which he reduces my consciousness (PC, 83). …

The question of hospitality and of the welcoming of otherness is central to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In his Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida highlights the primordial role of the concept of hospitality in the philosophy of Levinas and goes as far as to call Levinas's Totality and Infinity immense treatise of hospitality.1 And indeed, numerous commentators have discussed this dimension of hospitality in the thought of Levinas.2 Few, however, have explored the exilic structure particular to that hospitality and that welcoming. And although many commentators have explored dimensions of exile in Levinas' philosophy-pertaining to his biography,3 his style,4 his vocabulary5-none has, to my knowledge, attempted to show the centrality of the concept of exile in the totality of Levinas's work, as well as the fundamental role this concept plays in articulating the structure of the hospitality of otherness. It is my thesis, however, that the philosophy of hospitality worked out in Levinas' thought is intimately connected to exile. While the theme of hospitality permeates the work of Levinas, it is articulated, at every step, in relation to the concept of exile. My goal in this essay will be to show this centrality of the concept of exile in Levinas, as well as how this concept illuminates the Levinassian thematic of hospitality. We can distinguish two main trends in Levinas' treatment of exile. The first deals with the exile of the face with regard to the world of objects constituted by the self. According to Levinas, the face of the other is not another object in the world which the self can comprehend and dispose of at will. On the contrary, the face escapes all attempts by the self to grasp or objectify it, thus remaining exiled from its world. But this exile raises a number of questions. Must not the face be at some point be grasped as an object if a relationship with it is to be possible? If the face escapes all attempts on the part of the self to constitute it into an object of the world, if the face refuses to be encountered within the world of the self, how is an approach of the face to ever take place? An approach to the face is possible, according to Levinas, only at the price of a profound transformation of the structures of the self. The self must itself experience exile - a de-centering, a de-positing of itself as center of the universe-if an encounter with the exilic dimension of the other is to be possible. The approach to the face is thus itself structured as an exile, as a movement of the self outside of itself, outside of its situation as origin and foundation, into the realm of otherness. This is the second sense of exile in Levinas's work. But this exile also raises a number of questions. How can one account for this sudden shift in the structures of the self-of a self understood as the origin of the world to a self exiled, torn from its own world towards the other? What provokes this exile? And what's more, how can such an exile lead to hospitality? It is difficult to see how an exiled self, torn from its world, could become a source of hospitality. It is these two problems that I want to address in this article: How is a hospitality of the exiled face possible and how can an exiled self offer such a hospitality? In both cases, the condition of exile seems to be the very antithesis of hospitality. It is difficult to see how the face which resolutely remains exiled with regards the structures of the self could ever lend itself to hospitality. It is also difficult to see how a self, itself exiled, could ever be capable of hospitality. In this essay I shall first deal with the problem posed by the exile of the face and after that with the problem posed by the exile of the self in an attempt to show how, ultimately, exile constitutes the very structure of hospitality of the face. The Exile of the Face The exile of the face is described by Levinas in a key passage in Totality and Infinity which reads as follows: The epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity. …

Reviewed by Gregor Schnuer University of Edinburgh Spargo, R. Clifton. Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. 311. R. Clifton Spargo's study of Emmanuel Levinas addresses strong ethical concerns relating to our sense of memory, responsibility and justice. More specifically, Vigilant Memory concerns itself with Levinas's ethics, presenting key concepts in the philosopher's thought and striving to engage in a positive critique of his work. Focusing on the impact of the Holocaust on Levinas the theorist and foregrounding postmodern debates concerning ethics, Vigilant Memory formulates an understanding of what is at stake in the memory of injustice. Spargo demonstrates that for Levinas, the Holocaust serves as both the ultimate memory and the supreme injustice, a stance that leads Spargo to distinguish between the notion of "rights" and "responsibility" and to call for the formulation and practice of what he calls "vigilant memory." In his Introduction, Spargo explains that his study responds to three main critiques of Levinas's notion of the memory of injustice. The first of these critiques, historical and political in scope, ponders the significance of memory, especially memory of the Holocaust, and questions whether memory of victimization is often accorded cultural importance it does not deserve. The second is a mainly political concern regarding the influence of memory on identity formation and the extent to which the emergence of the victim's subjectivity might foster political instability. The third and most cynical critique of Levinas's concept is one that posits a circumstance in which victims become opportunists and use their victim status as a means of attaining sympathy, attention and special political rights (27). Spargo's analysis centers on these three positions, which, taken up in turn, form the basis for his extended critical engagement with Levinas's work. [End Page 144] In his first chapter, titled "Ethics as Unquieted Memory," Spargo offers a reading that underscores how important the concept of memory is in the ethical system Levinas elaborates. Contrary to Heidegger's conception of death as the final, concluding experience of being, Levinas's holds that post-mortem memory of the dead entails responsibilities for the living. Spargo posits that the work of memory goes beyond funerary rites and rituals, and in this first chapter, his engagement with the Holocaust takes shape. The interdisciplinary reach of this study allows for the introduction of a historical perspective, which fluidly evolves out of the initial engagement with memory. The concluding passages of the chapter connect death, memory and the Holocaust to arrive at Levinas's concept of "unjust death." In addition to highlighting the ethical and political importance of the memory of injustice and underscoring its universal significance, Spargo emphasizes Levinas's concern for history, demonstrating its resonance with contemporary theories of historiography formulated, for instance, by Michel de Certeau and Hayden White. Spargo's discussion of historiography strengthens his claims concerning the need for vigilance with respect to questions of memory and the Levinasian challenge to "history proper," allowing for history to be understood not as what is remembered, but as what has been remembered so far. The second chapter, "The Unpleasure of Consciousness," takes up the question of the ethics of mourning in Levinas's concept of bad conscience. Spargo shows the influence that Nietzsche's concept of bad conscience had on Levinas, recognizing, however, that the distance he takes from it allows him to formulate an understanding of bad conscience that bears on questions of memory, history and the moral self. The concept of responsibility is the one component of moral consciousness that Levinas is thought to be revising. Spargo shows how Levinas refutes the notion of responsibility as oppressive obligation and embraces the idea of an obliging duty that results from a rupture between intention and result, desire and reality. This makes the issue of complicity unavoidable and Spargo's discussion of "The Bad Conscience in History" and "The Bad Conscience and the Holocaust" argues for...

This paper discusses the relationship between language and eschatology in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. It will take into consideration the various concepts of eschatology in his work by regarding his philosophical writings as well as his Talmudic interpretations. As I will show, eschatology plays a significant role in the work of Levinas and is strongly linked to the notion of language. In this context, I would like to underline the relationship between the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas regarding language and eschatology, especially in light of the recently published correspondence between Rosenzweig and Margit (Gritli) Rosenstock-Huessy, the so-called "Gritli" letters. Furthermore, this article aims at explaining the importance of the notion of the voice in order to point out a new interpretation of the saying ( le dire ) and the said ( le dit ) in the later work of Levinas.

This article is meant to stage an encounter, a kind of rendezvous, between Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir regarding how alterity seems to enable an ethical relation for Levinas while closing one for Beauvoir. I will argue that Beauvoir's reading of Levinas on “the other” is not a charitable one, and the ethical ambivalence in Levinas's notion of alterity can motivate the praxis Beauvoir seeks for undoing social forms of oppression. I will start with Beauvoir's interpretation of alterity as “feminine otherness” in Levinas's ethics that, for her, originates in the violent perspective of male privilege. Then I will move to Levinas's response to this critique in a set of interviews with Philip Nemo, and to consideration of how a more charitable reading of alterity, understood as a sort of ambivalence in the structure of subjectivity, creates a close proximity between Levinas's and Beauvoir's ethics of action. I contend that both Beauvoir and Levinas respectively developed their ethics of action, either of ambiguity or of ambivalent alterity, in order to free thought from the absolute seriousness with which normative standards are held.

THE LITERARY ARTS AND ETHICS IN LEVINAS Can art jolt you out of ordinary? Can it interrupt your quotidian ways, ways of thinking and being, ways of relating to yourself and others? Once in a while, does some piece of art suddenly catch you off guard, and leave you radically different, unable to approach world as you had before? I suspect that answer to these questions is yes. Then a new set of questions arises: could those moments capture encounter with radically Other in Levinas's philosophy? Can Levinas help to explain experience of art - both moment of experiencing a work, and beyond to creativity which founds artwork? If so, can art be ethical in Levinas's sense? Levinas asserts that ethics is closely tied to language, or even, that ethics is discourse. This points especially to artistic works whose medium is written word over purely visual or musical arts, for example, but it is by no means a stretch to describe artistic experience as one of discourse. Some art - theatre, novels, film-even depicts conversation. And while Levinas clearly proposes that living, active discourse, exhibits this possibility of ethics, if not exclusively, at least more than the said, which might include written artwork, artworks at very least depict instances of saying, thereby complicating a strict distinction between and in their case.1 This saying carries weight and indeterminacy of ethical. In contrast said is in some sense fact, language that has been thematized and immobilized and so constitutes a betrayal of living, pre- formulated ethical relation. The superficiality of with regard to infinite responsibility involved in leads Levinas to describe this mode of language as game-like, a type of play. Though irreducibly separate, two are intimately woven- giving rise to which in turn subordinates original or pre-original gravity of saying.2 Levinas's own language, too, takes a turn in his later work towards what can be called a style. He strays from traditional philosophical terminology and argumentation, adopting language that evokes more than refers, that spurns its literal dictionary reference, and whose formulation into sentences or even fragments is often more beautiful than informative. The poetic face of his writing suggests a deeper affinity with literary art. Levinas's readers might struggle to pin down a concrete understanding of relation to Other. Since this relation is so radical there is no easy way to explain it and no ready examples upon which to draw. His descriptions verge on paradoxical: face remains something that is not seen, widow and orphan are somehow transcendent, Other is infinite but destitute. The world we live in and way that we ordinarily relate to one another are hardly Levinasian; and yet Levinas does not want to issue normative ordinances telling us what we should do. He remains committed to his belief that - even if it does not seem to be so in slightest - ethics is, and not merely should be, fundamental. He thus insists on writing in mode of description, also drawing on his background in phenomenology and its commitment to description, even though I do not think that we can take him to be describing our usual ways of dealing with one another. In his Preface to Totality and Infinity he writes of philosophers: they found morality on after establishing that their politics starts with assumption of war.3 Yet our world often reflects this view, so that we live in a kind of war with one another, for instance, how deeply competition characterizes our interactions with one another. To not fully listen to one's partner, to end a telephone conversation for sake of convenience or economy, to ask someone else to get you a glass of water: no other ethicist would condemn these as strongly as Levinas, and yet these characterize our daily existence more than encounters with radically Other. …

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.

Jacques Derrida has remarked that what occurred in Emmanuel Levinas's post-war philosophy : a discreet but irreversible mutation, one of those powerful, singular, and rare provocations in (Derrida 1996, 9). It certainly holds, if we accept the premise of Levinas' postwar philosophy, that then the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition is to be called to account before something that would at once precede and exceed its terms. In a way that challenges the age-old distinction between theory and praxis, asserts that philosophy answers to a more fundamental ethical exigency which all humans undergo, practically, all the time. This is the exigency, simple yet finally incomprehensible, of being faced by another (or precisely Other) person. It would be a difficult task, and one that is not mine here, to condense in a few words Levinas's accounts of this primal ethical encounter. The focus of this essay is on a path less well travelled in philosophic circles: Albert Camus's post-war ethical and political philosophy. Needed here is only a stress on how Levinas's ethics is an ethics of radical responsibility. As readers will know, Levinas's pivotal contention is that, in encountering the Other, a certain (non)relation is lived through by the subject, radically outside his/her conscious control. The Other is, if we can still say this, a uniqueness who signifies to us at that moment otherwise than through her/his relation to any informing semantic or historical totality (e.g., Entre Nous, 194-45; Totality and Infinity, III B). Rather, the Other's alterity manifests itself to the subject in this encounter as a lasting ethical call to answer for itself and to justify its place in the sun. For Levinas, indeed, we always - as speaking subjects - have responded to the Other. And this ineradicable responsibility, maintains, is the transcendental origin of language, and thus underlies (as it undermines) our capacity to give meaning to our Being. This is the discreet but powerful mutation in the history of ideas that Derrida sees first essayed in Levinas. This essay presents three contentions. First, through bringing the later ethico-political philosophy of Albert in The Rebel into an engagement with the more widely known ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I will contest the lasting silence concerning Camus's political philosophy in philosophical literature.1 Secondly, I argue that Camus's account of political subjectivity in L'Homme Revolte decisively anticipates that later expounded by Levinas. What unites with on the nature of subjectivity, I will maintain - and this is the essay's third contention - is that Camus, before Levinas, ties subjectivity to a primordial responsibility before and for other subjects. To be a subject for Camus, as for Levinas, I contend, is - before it is anything else - to have been called to take a stance vis-a-vis the others in whose time one lives.2 These contentions are carried out in the essay's three parts. Part I presents an exposition of Camus's ethical position in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. This exegesis of Camus with Levinas presents Camus's argument as an alternative attempt, before Levinas's, to conceptualize an ethics refractory to all totalizing philosophical systems. Part II then considers Camus's ethics after Levinas, as it were. There are resources in Camus's texts which, I contend, importantly at once resist and anticipate the kind of criticisms that offers of the occidental philosophical heritage, and which we can feasibly imagine he might accordingly have leveled at Camus's mature - avowedly Graecophile - position. The horizon of the essay, which is explicated in the Conclusion, is that Camus's theoretical voice is a potentially timely one in today's theoretical scene. What he offers, we will see, is a very rare thing: namely, a post-metaphysical ethical contention that is at once post-Nietzschean, yet avowedly universalist. …

Vigilant Memory focuses on the particular role of Emmanuel Levinas's thought in reasserting the ethical parameters for poststructuralist criticism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. More than simply situating Levinas's ethics within the larger context of his philosophy, R. Clifton Spargo offers a new explanation of its significance in relation to history. In critical readings of the limits and also the heretofore untapped possibilities of Levinasian ethics, Spargo explores the impact of the Holocaust on Levinas's various figures of while examining the place of mourning, the bad conscience, the victim, and the stranger/neighbor as they appear in Levinas's work. Ultimately, Spargo ranges beyond Levinas's explicit philosophical or implicit political positions to calculate the necessary function of the memory of injustice in our cultural and political discourses on the characteristics of a just society. In this original and magisterial study, Spargo uses Levinas's work to approach our understanding of the suffering and death of others, and in doing so reintroduces an essential ethical element to the reading of literature, culture, and everyday life.

In this paper, I will try to show that Levinas's ethics contains the aesthetics of mythological narrative that has metaphorical ("as if" meaning) and archetypal dimension, while the relation between ethics and aesthetics will be explained by Levinas's perception of eros. These goals are based on the assumption that myth represents uroboric foundation of Levinas's philosophy by which he succeeded in getting rid of the egology of Western thought, but also from the experience of his own imagination. The myth speaks about universals through various representations, relations, characters, etc. Taking into account that universals are archetypes, and that all archetypes in history of mankind have aesthetic dimension, Levinas's philosophy "offers" this archetypal structure of myth through its operational concepts such as eros, infinity, feminine, trauma, maternity, fecundity etc. I will try to show that Levinasian establishing of ethics as philosophia prima is based on language of metaphors and imagination as material and unknowable foundation of psyche.