Emmanuel Levinas Research Articles

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HOPE AND RECOVERY: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS FOR POST-WAR UKRAINE

The aim of this study is to explore the philosophical concepts of hope and recovery in the context of post-war Ukraine, a nation deeply affected by war and striving for reconstruction and the establishment of a new social order. The article integrates various philosophical approaches to the categories of hope and recovery, with a special focus on the ethical dimensions of this process. The research employs the dialectical method (particularly in the analysis of Hegel’s ideas), the hermeneutic approach (Paul Ricoeur), and the phenomenological ethics of responsibility (Emmanuel Levinas). Additionally, concepts of existentialism and utopianism are engaged to provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of hope. The key results of the study show that hope emerges not only as an individual spiritual phenomenon but also as a collective driving force fostering societal transformation. Recovery, in turn, is viewed not as mere reconstruction of what was destroyed but as the creation of new social, moral, and political realities. Levinas' and Ricoeur’s ethical concepts allow for a deeper understanding of the moral recovery process through responsibility for the other and forgiveness. The scientific novelty of the article lies in combining different philosophical schools to analyze hope and recovery in a post-war context, particularly by integrating phenomenological ethics of responsibility and hermeneutics of forgiveness into the understanding of Ukraine’s current situation. Theoretical significance lies in expanding the understanding of hope and recovery as central to the philosophical analysis of post-war revival. The practical significance of the research can be applied in developing ethical and political strategies for societal recovery after military conflicts, particularly in the context of national reconciliation and reconstruction of social relationships.

Stvoření a Setkání. Vybrané luriánské motivy v myšlení Emmanuela Lévinase

The paper presents some common motifs of two thinkers who, despite a historical gap of several hundred years, had common roots in the tradition of Judaism. The notion of the Encounter, as analysed by Emmanuel Levinas, and the cosmogonic process of Creation in Isaac Luria’s system of thought have a common motif in the phenomenon of the socalled “contraction” (Hebrew: tzimtzum). Despite the fact that for the first thinker it is the domain of ethics and for the second the domain of ontology, the act of a certain “self-limitation” or “withdrawal” plays in both cases a foundational role.

COVID-19 and (ir)responsible (im)mobility: Reading counter-practices through Levinas and Derrida.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected virtually all daily activities, relations and practices. People were expected to act responsibly by following social distancing, masking, sanitation and stay-home rules. The prevailing ethos of the time was that to protect others, one must first protect oneself. By examining the creative modalities through which (a few) people in Paris circumvented mobility restrictions to help and support those in need, this article investigates the relation between (im)mobility and (ir)responsibility. Is mobility, during a time of forced immobility, an irresponsible act? What does it mean to act responsibly during a life-threatening emergency? Does responsibility always require complete and unequivocal compliance with extant norms, or should responsibility also be evaluated in light of the motives that inspire (unauthorised) mobility? The issue of (ir)responsible (im)mobility is scrutinised here by drawing upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. While the former furthers our understanding of ethical relations, the latter makes us rethink the concept of response-ability and, in particular, the aporia this concept entails. As Derrida highlights, truly ethical acts are impossible for the very reason that all ethical acts are, at the very same time, responsible towards some and irresponsible towards others.

Escape to Judaism: Levinas’s First Steps toward Becoming a Jewish Thinker

Abstract This paper recontextualizes Emmanuel Levinas’s intellectual journey of the 1930s, focusing on his first philosophical and Jewish writings and his initial criticism of Martin Heidegger. It demonstrates Levinas’s philosophical transformation using newly discovered texts alongside published writings. These texts illustrate the early stage of his philosophical development and its connection to his first involvements with Jewish thought. An English translation of a newly discovered radio talk Levinas gave in 1937 is appended. This lecture enables a glimpse into the historical and philosophical context of the journey taken by a young immigrant Jewish philosopher in the intellectual scene of 1930s Paris.

The Non-Anthropocentric Other in Film: Towards a Spectral Ethics of Film

This article aims to add a further perspective to the discussion of the relationship between film and ethics. This perspective is important in today’s context, as the omnipresence of digital and mobile audiovisual images in everyday life increasingly determines our thinking and behaviour. However, there is a lack of appropriate critical reflection and ethical understanding of these images and their ontology. This article proposes a machine ethics of film from a film-philosophical perspective. Such an ethics draws on critical posthumanism, namely on Karen Barad’s “ethics of mattering”, which explicitly relates to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the Other and their death. Thereby, special attention is given to the ontological nexus of film and death, as well as to the idea of film’s spectrality (drawing on, e.g., Derrida, Barthes, and Leutrat), a context that is discussed along with Barad’s diffractive view on quantum entanglement. Following from the author’s earlier approaches to Barad’s agential realism in the context of film-philosophy and certain Heidegger-based arguments set out in earlier writings about film and death, this article introduces the figure of what is called the “machinic spectre of film”. From here, the outline of a possible spectral ethics of film is considered by giving reasons for the exploration of further questions.

Rendering the umwelt: Foley, animal life and ethics

This article considers the ethical implications of the use of Foley sound in wildlife documentaries. Almost all of the sounds that animals seem to make in these films and television programmes are added by Foley artists; animals in the wild are often filmed using telephoto lenses, beyond the reach of microphones. Crew or vehicle noise will also often muddy sounds recorded on location and so a clean soundtrack must be created in post-production. This article is based on first-hand interviews conducted with practising Foley artists. It details some of the techniques that Foley artists use to simulate the sounds of animals walking, chewing, scratching or otherwise engaging with their environments. It then draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas to frame ethical activity as the act of encountering the other in terms which recognize and accept their otherness as such. I suggest first that Foley might impede such an ethical encounter with animal life because it seems, at first, to anthropomorphize the animal and to reduce them to a subset of the human. I go on to suggest, however, that Foley is also invested in representing what the biologist Jakob von Uexküll has labelled the umwelt of the animal – the animal’s unique ‘lifeworld’. According to this reading, Foley does ethical work in the wildlife documentary; it brings us to an encounter with the animal’s otherness and intimates that humanity’s own umwelt is but one amongst many. In this way, Foley reveals that the human perception of the world is neither objective nor universal nor absolute. It decentres the human in the way we conceive the world and ethically frames the animal Other as coequal with the human.

From Rhetoric to Reality: Warsan Shire's “Home” and the Refugee Crisis

This paper examines Warsan Shire's poem "Home" within the context of the contemporary refugee crisis driven by civil wars in various countries. The paper also discusses how, despite the ideals of open borders and the right to seek safety advocated by globalization, human rights, and the United Nations, refugees frequently encounter difficulties such as humiliation, xenophobic aggression, and discrimination in host nations. Applying Emmanuel Levinas's "politics of hospitality" and Gordon Allport's "contact hypothesis" as theoretical frameworks, this study argues that genuine hospitality, marked by positive interactions and proper integration, is essential for bridging the gap between theoretical principles and the practical treatment of refugees in the domains of human rights discourse and globalization. This study makes a significant contribution by highlighting the challenges faced by asylum seekers in host countries and urging humanity to offer genuine hospitality to mitigate the fears of civil war, terrorism, and other forms of violence.

“Society is the present of teaching”: Teaching as a Phenomenon in Levinas's Unedited Lecture Notes

AbstractIn this paper, Katja Castillo approaches the phenomenon of teaching through an analysis of Emmanuel Levinas's unedited conference notes titled “Les nourritures,” “Les enseignements,” and “L'écrit et l'oral.” Levinas's thinking prior to the publication of his major works provides an entry point to his philosophy. In this light Castillo interprets his conference notes as laying the groundwork for the argument he develops later in Totality and Infinity. Drawing on the notes, she describes the phenomenon of teaching as a place to bracket subjective freedom in order to let the other call it into question. The phenomenon of teaching serves as a way to describe the relationship between the same and the other. It is, according to Levinas, a unique interplay between interiority and exteriority, where subjective freedom is intertwined with responsibility to the other, with having to answer to the other. He describes the structure of teaching as characterized by six parts: by being given a past, by reflection, by penetration of freedom, by critical spirit, by transcendence of teaching, and as true symbolism. Following the discussion of Levinas's early writings, Castillo returns to his first major work, Totality and Infinity published in 1961, with the intention of examining the evolution of his phenomenological attitude over time. This approach reveals that Levinas's engagement in formulating a philosophy of education was more robust than previous research has indicated.

The Critical Meeting between Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler (2) - Butler’s Transformation of the Concept of Vulnerability on Levinas -

The Critical Meeting between Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler (2) - Butler’s Transformation of the Concept of Vulnerability on Levinas -

A Just Englishman in Russia: The Ethical Self in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring

ABSTRACT In her historical novel, The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald explores English identity in pre-revolutionary Russia by putting her expatriate hero Frank Reid to the test in ethical situations. Engaging with critical attention to the novel’s moral meaning, this article offers an ethical reading alongside Paul Ricoeur’s study on ethical intention and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face of the other. Frank’s ethical self can be imputed from his aim of becoming a just man in the Moscow business community. To achieve that aim, he must make ethical deliberations based on his practical wisdom and the moral injunction that regulates the intersubjective relationship between the self and the other. He ultimately fails his ethical aim because of the unjust institution – he is othered in/by Russia. I conclude with a gesture that the novel is Fitzgerald’s ethical intention of giving a voice to the other Russian culture.

Ethical Relations of Muslims and Non-Muslims in Creating Culture of Peace at Peace Place Pati in the Perspective of Emmanuel Levinas

Ethical Relations of Muslims and Non-Muslims in Creating Culture of Peace at Peace Place Pati in the Perspective of Emmanuel Levinas

Ethical Discourse of Responsibility in The Covid19 Pandemic Humanitarian Disaster

This article aims to elaborate on how Emmanuel Levinas' discourse on the ethics of responsibility applies to the humanitarian crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Levinas offers a concrete ethical concept for addressing humanitarian issues, distinguishing himself from earlier ethical philosophy experts. The research method employed is qualitative, utilizing a literature review approach. The findings and discussion reveal that Levinas' perspective on the ethics of responsibility emphasizes concrete responsibility in encounters with the 'Face of the Other'. Furthermore, responsibility represents a form of human identity from a humanitarian perspective when facing the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Levinas, unconditional responsibility is not something we receive or a rule we agree to bind ourselves to, but rather something that exists before we make any decisions. Unconsciously, we already have unlimited responsibility towards others. The conclusion drawn is that adhering to health protocols is a concrete manifestation of Levinas' ethics of responsibility in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is oriented towards the safety of others. Levinas' ethics of responsibility is asymmetrical. The ethical discourse on responsibility discussed in this study is limited to the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, thus it has limitations in broader explanations. Although Levinas' grand ideas may not suffice to solve all the ethical issues we face, their strength lies in reminding us of the inherent nature of ethical demands that should underpin all moral theories. Levinas invites us to reconsider the essence of ethical responsibility, which transcends formal rules and agreements, towards a deeper understanding of our relationships with others

Blasphemy! Levinas and the Unjustification of Suffering

Abstract In this article, Severson explores the insights of Emmanuel Levinas regarding theodicy and the problem of evil. Levinas considers philosophical and practical justifications of suffering to be blasphemous, violating the sanctity of the suffering of the other person, even when well-meant. Severson introduces distinctions between “pain” and “suffering” to extrapolate and explain Levinas’s striking rejection of theodicy.

Towards Prejudiced Unhomeliness and Corrective Alterity: Ontology, Hermeneutics, and Transgressive Myth in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

With the advent of today’s cross-cultural alterities, the percolating notions of ‘home’, ‘self’, and ‘other’, have undergone radical transformations. This alterity, if at all, has bred a world of changing identities under the indefatigable pretext of a global consciousness. In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas has made us leery of forging a reality that never existed; a ‘saraband of cultures’ where nomadic figures become rootless subjects. Amid these palpable alterities, the ‘self’ has embraced the transient tropes of a planetary world and a diasporic consciousness. The question remains: how is it possible to think of postcolonial subjectivity amid a world of mobility and displacement? Or, more precisely, how can we conceive of subjectivity and alterity? Overridden by these questions, this article critiques the tacit roots of the poststructuralist subject whose rootless wandering demeans the primacy of historical rootedness. The subject’s errant rootlessness necessitates a thinking that is neither absolute nor homeless. The postmodern nomad forsakes the facticity of home and forges an otherness that is irreducibly errant. In doing so, the nomad grants the ‘other’ its own myths and ideals. Postcolonial subjectivity, as this article underscores, possesses an indispensable rootedness in the facticity of shared existence. This article re-thinks postcolonial subjectivity in accordance with the hermeneutic horizon of ‘factical rootedness’ in a world of impeding prejudices. While the Western hero represents the ‘other’, the postmodern nomad transcends the land. Both models of subjectivity are culturally and politically suspect. Whereas the colonial subject reduces the ‘other’ to an object of experience, the postmodern nomad does not defy the ‘other’s myths and idols. It so happens that instead of forging an alterity that evinces the self/other dichotomy by embracing an absolute otherness, hermeneutic prejudice encourages an alterity that defies the chauvinistic logic of the subject and the ‘other’s’ claim to absolute estrangement. The discussion on hermeneutic subjectivity calls for a radical return to the soil to which only the figure of the prejudiced subject can uphold. In The Waste Land, the Greek seer Tiresias, defied by Eliot’s prejudiced stance, trespasses the threshold of pure subjectivity and forges a transformative subjectivity that illuminates the corrective alterity of prejudice (Vorurteil).

Paganism as a Political Problem: Levinas’s Understanding of Judaism in the 1930s

In response to the rise of neopagan fascist political theologies in Europe in the 1930s, the young Emmanuel Levinas developed a novel conception of the theopolitical role of Judaism. The existing scholarly consensus maintains that (1) Levinas responded to the rise of pagan Hitlerism by opposing it to a Jewish conception of transcendence and (2) this putative contrast involved a critique of Heidegger’s thought, which Levinas identified with pagan Hitlerism. By focusing on under-examined occasional pieces Levinas wrote in the 1930s, I offer a significantly revised understanding of Levinas’s position in the 1930s. The argument shows how Levinas describes Judaism as a way of ‘being riveted’ that does not resort to transcendence, as does the Greco-Christian West, but rather affirms the immanence of existence while breaking with its disposition to paganism. This places Levinas’s conception of Judaism on the same plane as paganism and within the terms of Heidegger’s philosophy. From this perspective, a new way of understanding Levinas’s theopolitical view of Judaism as “the anti-paganism par excellence” takes shape.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome: A Pluriversal Narrative to Decolonise the Past and Confront Universal Eurocentrism

The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a convoluted journey through time and space. At once a work of science fiction, a medical mystery, and a history of malaria research, this hybrid novel sets into rivalry India’s old-time wisdom and spirituality against Western science and English colonial presumptuousness, thus advocating transmodernity and the pluriversality put forward by critics such as Rosa María Rodriguez Magda, Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo, among others. This paper will analyse the way in which this novel denies the existence of a universal scientific method by deconstructing the certainties of an exclusively rationalist discourse whose discoveries have often gone hand in hand with exploitation, unequal power relations and colonization. Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance and Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas about the ethics of silence and knowledge will also be used to analyse silence as an alternative epistemological framework through which the dominant discourse can be undermined and the subaltern heard, and as a means to make amends for the injustices of the past by reclaiming the histories written by those who were made ‘others’ by the English imperial power.

Deep ecology and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: the importance of moving from biocentric responsibility to environmental justice

Environmental theory and practice can benefit greatly from Emmanuel Levinas’ non-ontological philosophy of the Other in order to address the current global environmental crisis. From this viewpoint, this article focuses on 2 major positions within deep ecology. We discuss the significance of transitioning from one of them, which represents biocentric responsibility, to the other, which seeks to achieve environmental justice by challenging the hegemony of institutionalised environmentalism. In Levinasian terms, this is represented by moving from the anarchic realm of ethics (face-to-face) to the totalising realm of politics (humanity), where the naked face of the Other becomes visible in the presence of a Third, and decision-making and concrete disputes resolution becomes necessary. Within this framework, historical and current inequalities compel the global North to degrow in order to allow the Others to weather the consequences of resource overconsumption and inequality.

Hermeneutics before Ontology: How Later Levinas Better Understands Heidegger

Abstract This paper examines Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical development from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being as a self-critique and revised understanding of Martin Heidegger. It focuses on later Levinas’s analysis of language in terms of the difference between Saying and Said. For Levinas, the Said represents the betrayal of ethical Saying into ontological essence. This echoes Heidegger’s notion of the forgetfulness of Being in beings. However, Levinas critiques Heidegger’s own philosophy as remaining within the Said. The paper explores three strategies of “unsaying” that Levinas discerns in Western philosophy to disrupt ontological Said: ontology itself, skepticism, and philosophical conversation. It argues that Levinas ultimately seeks an alternative “prophetic” mode of language beyond philosophy that enacts difference, which the paper relates to Talmud. The paper claims that the later Levinas no longer simply opposes Greek to Jewish thought, but rather seeks to deploy a specifically Jewish form of language to interrupt Western metaphysics from within.

Gagarin Sixty Years Later: Earth and Place after Heidegger and Levinas

Abstract In this article I re-examine the well-known distinction between rootedness and uprootedness that Emmanuel Levinas draws in his short text “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us” (1961). This distinction addresses the relation between men and place either as an attachment to place (paganism, Heidegger) or as a freedom with regard to place (Judaism, Gagarin). I question this opposition from a contemporary perspective in environmental philosophy, namely from the growing awareness of the interconnectedness between place and Earth. I contend that this new perspective changes the understanding of dwelling today because of Earth’s exteriority with regard to place. I argue that this exteriority is neither infinite nor a totality.

Wolves as witnesses: animals and depictions of the Holocaust in Misha Defonseca’s Misha and Francesco Lotoro’s Misha e i lupi

ABSTRACT This article investigates animals and the Holocaust through a case study of wolves in Misha Defonseca's fraudulent Holocaust memoir Misha and Francesco Lotoro's opera Misha e i lupi – an adaptation of Defonseca's book. I demonstrate that their respective portrayals of wolves distinguish Defonseca's hoax from Lotoro's musical memorial but, simultaneously, that both versions use animals to illustrate the inhumanity of genocide. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I dub this phenomenon ‘animal witnessing,' and, given the divergences between Defonseca and Lotoro, I posit that animal witnessing takes animals as a vehicle to expound individualized understandings of the Holocaust.