Emmanuel Levinas Research Articles

THE RELATIONALITY OF DISAPPEARANCE

In this article I examine what happens to the “I” when the other disappears. I elucidate the relationship between ontic – relational ties to specific others – and ontological relationality – the fundamental relationality that facilitates the very existence of the “I.” The loss of an ontic relationality, I contend, ensures that the “I” can never be the same as it was prior to the loss. But the disappearance of an ontic relationality also accentuates that the “I” cannot disavow its ontological relationality, despite the pain and suffering brought about by the loss of a specific other. I argue that exposure to this ontological relationality, through the deprivation of an ontic one, offers us the opportunity to re-think habituated and potentially damaging forms of relationality, particularly in an age when neoliberal rationality encourages us to turn away from the other and to seek shelter in the self. To explicate the chiastic relationship between ontic and ontological relationality, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “hinge,” Judith Butler’s work on grief and mourning, and Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the “face.” By looking specifically at remembrance campaigns for victims of forced disappearance – particularly in Guatemala and Argentina – I show how faces of the disappeared continue to haunt the political present in ways that refuse the fantasy of a return to a former order. In doing so, these campaigns keep exposing us to the ontological relationality that underpins all human life, encouraging us to find new ways of relating that transcend our habituated and repetitive relational behaviours. This exposure, I argue, illustrates that no amount of self-sufficiency allows us to escape the ontological necessity of relationality. The disappearance of the other, any other, discloses the fraudulent anti-relationality of the neoliberal era by revealing the ties that connect beings together. This disclosure, I conclude, constitutes the importance of the relationality of disappearance.

ALL OUR RELATIONS

The aim of this essay is to examine the status and promise of Emmanuel Levinas’s humanism for a posthuman and more-than-human age. I suggest that, even though Levinas’s approach partially reproduces classical forms of anthropocentrism, a careful reading of his writings on humanism uncovers surprising resources for thinking about ethics and relationality beyond human beings. I close by suggesting that one of Levinas’s early writings on ritual anticipates the need to adopt practices that reconfigure our habitual relations to the world as a whole, both human and more-than-human. As such, I argue that his work can be mined for important insights for reconstituting a genuinely post-anthropocentric form of life.

Spirituality as Consummatory Experience: The Promises and Limitations of John Dewey's Phenomenology of the Religious

ABSTRACT The mission of this article is to unpack Dewey's phenomenology of religious experience as it is found in both A Common Faith and Art as Experience, and to outline its promises and limitations. After first piecing together Dewey's position on the nature and constitution of religious experiences, I explore the question of whether or not a Deweyan phenomenology can assimilate or account for some of the most forceful and intense sorts of spiritual intuition as described by several philosophers of religion. William James, Rudolf Otto, and Emmanuel Levinas are among the figures discussed.

레비나스와 페미니즘 간의 대화 : 레비나스에 대한 페미니즘의 이해와 오해

레비나스와 페미니즘 간의 대화 : 레비나스에 대한 페미니즘의 이해와 오해

Levinas and the question of politics

Recent political critiques and appropriations of Emmanuel Levinas’ work demonstrate the need to fundamentally re-evaluate the meaning and status of his philosophy. Both the Marxist critiques (often apropos Lacan) and ‘third wave’ applications interpret Levinas’ singular and unique relation to others—a bond which prohibits even the slightest trace of historical, hermeneutic, or political context—as the greatest obstacle to a Levinasian politics. From this standpoint, Levinas offers little more than a hyperbolic ethics that, at best, ignores, and, at worst, provides philosophical cover for, the political status quo (often defined by capitalism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism). To counter this established link between Levinas’ philosophy and his potential for political thought, this article reexamines the significance of the decontextualized social relation. I argue that such interpretations misapprehend the intended analytical depth of Levinas’ thought, which, in turn, misconstrue the relationship between Levinas and more traditional social ontologies. As a consequence, Levinas’ valuable normative import for political theory is obscured. By shifting our perspective, we can understand Levinas as articulating a philosophy of political utopianism well-suited to the challenges we face in our present conjuncture.

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

Who is the Other in the age of the Anthropocene? Introducing the Unknown Other in climate justice discourse

This paper contributes to advancing the research agenda on ethics in the Anthropocene (Schmidt JJ, Brown PG and Orr CJ (2016) Ethics in the Anthropocene: A research agenda. The Anthropocene Review 3(3): 188–200). Specifically, it responds to the call to explore ‘the new human condition’ (Palsson G, Szerszynski B, Sörlin S et al. (2013) Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Integrating the social sciences and humanities in global environmental change research. Environmental Science & Policy 28: 8) in the age of the Anthropocene by rethinking the relational ontology within the context of climate change. I propose that given the global and long-term implications of climate change, climate justice discourse should go beyond the Self–Other binary and incorporate the notion of the Unknown Other. By drawing on the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and moral sentimentalism scholarship, I theorize the ethical relationship with the Unknown Other. I propose that the encounter with the ‘face’ (identity, experience, voice) of the Unknown Other is conditioned by the Self’s contribution to climate change. Therefore, the encounter with the Unknown Other is not physical and corporeal but ethical, and thus triggers a moral engagement that has a dual base – responsibility and emotion. The former is expressed in the form of asymmetrical responsibility and the latter in the form of empathy.

레비나스의 타자윤리로 본 매그위치와 미스 해비셤의 부모 되기 : 찰스 디킨즈의 『위대한 유산』

Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology of the face, this paper explores how Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations discusses the ethical inquiries about a self, the other, and a nation. By particularly dwelling on Levinas’ assertion that “my child is a stranger, but a stranger who is me,” it focuses on a self’s transcendence through filiation and a child’s irreducible exteriority as the Other, which are represented in the parental relationships that Magwitch and Miss Havisham establish with Pip and Estella respectively without biological kinship. In keeping with Levinas’ ethics, this novel illustrates how Pip grows as an ethical subject taking responsibility for the Other by responding to the face of Magwitch, a defenseless stranger who in his nudity and poverty speaks to him. In this novel Magwitch and Havisham seek to recommence their new life through their children, just as Levinas states that the relation with a child bestows a self with the possibility of the child beyond its own possibility, and enables a self to enter into the child’s future, exceeding its own identity. There is, however, a fatal flaw in their parenthood in that they ignore the point that the child resumes the unicity of the parents and yet remains exterior to the parents. They fail to access the face of their child without being acutely conscious that the child is still radically Other they cannot possess nor dominate. Furthermore, Great Expectations offers significant suggestions regarding our infinite responsibility for the Others present behind the face of the Other: we should discern a good stranger deserving our hospitality from a hostile alien, for example, embodied by problematic Orlick; although a fraternal community consisting of the whole of humanity, can be effectuated only when justice is mediated by the political system of the state, literature should assume a duty to criticize it outside the system like prophets in the Old Testament for the weak such as Magwitch and Havisham who fall victim to violence of Victorian social structure.

레비나스와 정치적인 것(1) - 레비나스에서 국가의 문제, 국가 안에서 국가를 넘어

레비나스와 정치적인 것(1) - 레비나스에서 국가의 문제, 국가 안에서 국가를 넘어

Beyond Empathy: Teaching Alterity

Clinical empathy has been increasingly recognized as an important component of both professionalism and good patient care. It is generally understood as identifying commonality between patient and provider and responding to this shared experience with appropriate care and concern. However, many clinical encounters are between strangers with little shared experience, which seems to present a challenge for both empathy and a sense of responsibility toward the patient. Physicians can also develop a deep sense of caring and responsibility by learning to appreciate the alterity, the otherness, of the patient, and this skill, like clinical empathy can be modeled and taught. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described respect for alterity as foundational to human relationships. That is, my primary experience in meeting other people is one of difference, not an immediate sense of similarity. This sense of difference is both superficial and profound, although in most cases we will recognize only the superficial. Recognizing the profundity of difference opens one up to a radical sense of alterity that is the source of ethics, including our responsibility to the other. By exploring Levinas’ descriptions of human responsibility, humans as infinite and unique, and the consequences of this philosophy for the clinical encounter, it is evident that respect for alterity represents an underappreciated source of human caring, accessible in clinical relationships, even between a patient and physician with radically different life experiences. The implications of this for medical education are that we must help students appreciate and respect both the commonality we share with our patients, and the differences that makes them special and worthy of our care and attention.

Lyrical Slippage, Meaning-Making, and Proximity in Song 2:10-13

Abstract Where does lyric significance happen? With recent interdisciplinary studies from the fields of aesthetics and neuroscience offering support to Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of proximity, I propose that proximity is the maternal body of lyrical meaning. In this paper, I will illustrate the case by unpacking the mental processing of the lyrical imageries in Song 2:10–13, and highlight two aspects of proximity along the way. First, the perception of lyrical imagery is more complex than a representational correspondence between the word and the world. It covers the stages from the verbal cues to multisensory imageries, to evoked synaesthetic experiences, to accompanied feelings and provoked actions. Cognitively it is best described as one’s approximation toward the core semantic sense of the verbal cues, which is diversified by the reader’s embodied minds. Second, at the root of the aesthetic experience is one’s sense of self, which is susceptible to the intrigue of alterity. One’s reception of lyrical imageries in Song 2:10–13 can be characterized as an over-abundant synaesthetic experience. It directs one’s attention to an anterior receptivity embedded in subjectivity by way of the excess of the sensing over the semantic, and the sensed over the sensing. This reduction to the baseline level of function, or the sheer sensation of oneself, beckons the lyrical subject to become aware of one’s a prior proximity to alterity. In brief, while the readers’ individualized approximations preclude a verifiable universal reception, they do not warrant the kind of hermeneutic violence that overrides the text with the readers’ contexts. Rather, by being awakened to one’s susceptibility to the otherness of the poem, the lyrical subject realizes that proximity is the ethical precondition in making sense of the poem and oneself.

Fools, jesters and the possibility of responsible leadership

The vibrant academic and practitioner conversation about corporate responsibility does not appear to reduce the number of scandals involving unethical managerial behaviour. This leaves the question of whether responsible organisational leadership is possible. Some leadership scholars recently suggested that understanding leadership as a relational process can facilitate more responsible leadership practice. This article develops the relational leadership perspective by offering a critical discussion of the possibility of responsible relational leadership. I construct an understanding of responsibility following the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. I then use the archetypal figure of the Fool as an imaginary device to translate Levinasian and Derridian ethics into lived experiences and thus illuminate the conditions under which responsibility may be possibilised. This theoretical analysis exposes the irresolvable tension between responsibility and the relational in leadership but also identifies ways through which leadership actors can strive for responsibility through purposefully engaging with the tension.

Levinas, bureaucracy, and the ethics of school leadership

Given present criticisms of contemporary education and leadership practices, this article investigates the ways in which the basic concepts of state freedom and bureaucracy stifle ethics and social justice in educational leadership practices through the philosophical framework of Emmanuel Levinas. By investigating Levinas’ ‘an-archy’, the definition of ethics and justice in school leadership can be reframed towards responsibility to otherness rather than individual freedom. The anarchical ethic of pure responsibility to the Other suggests that educational leaders should prioritize specific acts of responsibility over general actions based on the assumptions of traditional state education. Aspects of transactional, transformational, and social justice leadership are critiqued from this perspective.

Rupturing Salem, Reconsidering Subjectivity: Tituba, the Witch of Infinity in Maryse Condé’s <i>I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem</i>

The Salem witch-hunt, invoking the “red hunt” analogy of the McCarthy era, has been a persistent metaphor for persecution, a symbol of fanatic excess in policing the community boundaries. In American cultural history, however, Salem is regarded American only insofar as it proves un-American—as an exception to American exceptionalism. In particular, Tituba, the only non-white “witch” of the trials to whom the unleashing of the hysteria itself has often been attributed, embodies what is negated in Salem against which Americanness is to be affirmed. Maryse Condé’s 1986 novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem recuperates Tituba from this darkness not only to reconfigure American identity but ultimately to reconsider human subjectivity. In Condé’s Salem, New England Puritanism showcases the primal scene of American identity formation, in which the personal, national, and religious subjectivities are fused to form the American self as the autonomous self-possessed individual. Tituba, in contrast, exemplifies an alternative subjectivity as an embodied being constituted in relation to others. Similar to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical subject, Condé’s Tituba highlights the primacy of the other in the formation of the human subject, ultimately rupturing the totality of history with a counter-history of silenced voices or the infinity of the other.

Krucha podmiotowość, czyli o sporze na gruncie Lévinasowskiej i Ricœurowskiej filozofii człowieka oraz niektórych jego implikacjach dla rozumienia zdrowia psychicznego

Poniższe studium stawia sobie jako zadanie skonfrontowanie dwóch koncepcji kruchej podmiotowości: jednej autorstwa Emmanuela Lévinasa i drugiej, wypracowanej przez Paula Ricœura. Zestawienie to nie jest wszelako celem samym w sobie. Owszem, chodzi w nim najpierw o wskazanie zbieżności i rozbieżności istniejących pomiędzy obydwoma ujęciami otwartego i labilnego w swej tożsamości ludzkiego podmiotu. Krok ów służy dalej uwydatnieniu punktów dyskusyjnych, które wskutek napięcia generowanego przez niezgodności pobudzają do myślenia i poszukiwania mediacji. W celu zilustrowania płodności tej kontrowersji zostaje ona przeniesiona na obszar filozofii psychiatrii, gdzie podejmuje się próbę zastosowania obydwu antropologicznych stanowisk w filozoficznej interpretacji istoty fenomenu schizofrenii. Zarysowana w ten sposób wykładnia patogenezy wybranego zjawiska pozwala z kolei na sformułowanie ostrożnych wniosków odnośnie do samego sporu Lévinasa i Ricœura w kwestii podmiotowości etycznej, a zwłaszcza co do odczytania ewolucji ich własnych koncepcji.

Cruciform Encounter in a Time of Crisis: Enfleshing an Ethics of Alterity

This article connects the work of M. Shawn Copeland to a dialogue between Bernard Lonergan and Emmanuel Levinas. Exploring these authors’ insights on intersubjectivity, alterity, dialectic, and embodiment, the article develops a framework for engaging and overcoming contemporary crises of relationality. These resources are then used to reframe questions of otherness in terms of the imitation of Christ, advocating encounter grounded in open, prayerful engagement with the marginalized.

Translation as an Ethical Relationship between Ethics and Politics. An Interpretive Reading of Emmanuel Levinas

The otherness of the other, considered as foreignness, is deeply intertwined with the problem of translation and with the one of morality. How can the two of them be brought together based on the work of Emmanuel Levinas? The main question which leads my analysis is the following: does morality limit itself to the relationship with another person or does it concern society in its entirety? In the thought of Levinas, ethics is placed on the side of the dual relationship with the other, while the presence of the third institutes the realm of politics. At first glance, the two dimensions contradict each other, for the first one is characterized by infinity, overabundance, and love, while the second one comports a dimension of finitude, measure, symmetry, and justice. Yet these two domains always exist contemporaneously, each of them needing the limitation brought by its counterpart. How is their relationship to be thought? I will argue that the answer can be found within the domain of translation, understood as an essential asymmetry that is both harmonic and disruptive.

Beyond Atheism and Atheology: The Divine Humanism of Emmanuel Levinas

Is the divine a meaningful and indispensable element of moral responsibility? Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics have brought new expression to the question of God and the Good. Contemporary engagements with Levinas’ provocation, however, have generated a morass of contrary judgments and enigmatic explications, including praise and criticism for its atheology, secular transcendence, and crypto-religious conceit. The essay takes issue with secular and atheistic interpretations of Levinas, arguing that his mature ethics offer a philosophical species of divine humanism, one that justifies the indispensable significance of the divine for moral responsibility. It examines the philosophical problems that lead to the creation of new phenomenological descriptions for divine transcendence, and it sheds light on the seemingly erratic scattering of divine names—infinite, third person, trace, immemorial past, absence, beyond being, illeity—as improvisational orchestrations for God at the margins of moral responsibility.

Kenotic Chorology as A/theology in Nishida and beyond

In this paper, I explore a possible a/theological response to what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God’—or Holderlin’s and Heidegger’s ‘flight of the gods’—through a juxtaposition of the Christian-Pauline concept of kenōsis and the ancient Greek-Platonic notion of chōra, and by taking Nishida Kitarō’s appropriations of these concepts as a clue and starting point. Nishida refers to chōra in 1926 to initiate his philosophy of place (basho) and then makes reference to kenōsis in 1945 in his final work that culminates—without necessarily completing—his oeuvre. What he had thereby accomplished is an inversion of Platonism resulting in the collapse of the transcendent/immanent—idea/genesis and by implication the Heaven/Earth—dichotomy. I then unpack the ethical implication of this kenotic chōra Nishida has left us with. It suggests from us a certain response to the desacralization or secularization of the world. I shall build upon this suggestion and unfold its implications by drawing from a variety of sources, starting with Nishida but including others, such as Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gianni Vattimo, Reiner Schurmann, Mark Taylor, Jurgen Moltmann, and other philosophical and theological sources.

Political Justice: Levinas Contra Aristotle

In this paper, I argue that two radically different conceptions of political justice can be derived from the work of Aristotle and Emmanuel Levinas—notions of justice that are indeed directly opposed. Aristotle defines justice in terms of considerations of moderation, prudence, and measure, where the virtuous actor is supposed to demonstrate aspects of character and perform acts that are neither deficient nor excessive; yet the ethics of Levinas, as instantiated in justice, is a demand that responding to the needs of others not be limited by moderate considerations, but can precisely be realized as an exorbitant and anarchic assumption of responsibility. It thus becomes of decisive importance for both a thinking of the political, and political praxis, in determining which conception of justice is found to be more compelling. I illustrate the stakes of this difference with reference to the politics of asylum, and in particular, a discussion of the historical case of the Kindertransport.