Abstract
Despite the fact that Levinas has often been accused of having little or no room for the maternal in his writing, his rhetoric nonetheless applies maternal tendencies that complicate his ethical stance and its relation to the experience of vulnerability. Haunting Levinas’s oeuvre as the locus classicus for the un-substitutable, which in turn breaks with ontologies of sacrifice, the maternal inflects Levinas’s thought in crucial junctures, whether this be the responsibility for the Other, or his thoughts on ipseity, as well as his articulation of the relation to the Same. Through a close reading of the two versions of “Substitution” as well as select passages from Otherwise than Being, the article demonstrates how Levinas’s ethical inflection and grid of utterance simultaneously depend on and disavow the maternal as an ontological occurrence.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
