Emmanuel Levinas Research Articles

What do the Angels Say? Alterity and the Ascents of Emanuel Swedenborg and the Baal Shem Tov

Abstract This paper examines the history of boundary crossing and boundary preservation between Jews and Christians in the eighteenth century via an unorthodox path. Two men, a Swedish Lutheran natural philosopher and a charismatic Polish Rabbi, give their accounts of ascents to the heavens, both in the 1740s. The lives of Emanuel Swedenborg and the Baal Shem Tov did not intersect, but their otherworldly experiences tell related stories of strife between Jews and Christians while betraying something of a shared horizon concerning the future of their religious communities, and concerning sacred texts and their interpretation. Using a phenomenological framework informed by Emmanuel Levinas, and with theories of experience articulated by Steven Katz and Martin Jay at hand, this paper understands these accounts as articulations of relationship: not just the relationship between the subject and God, scripture, or the heavens, but articulations of the fraught relationship with the religious other in the earthly, human realm. By placing Swedenborg and the Besht, as it were, face to face, this paper emphasizes the presence of the religious other in their experiences, even in their private encounters with the Divine, and even though the intersubjectivity these experiences expose is characterized by difference, difficulty, and asymmetry.

Hearing silence in Dylan Tighe’s Record: Madness, autobiographical performance and the ethical encounter

Abstract This article addresses the possibility of an ethical encounter in autobiographical performance concerning madness. Using previous work on autobiographical performance and the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, it specifically analyses Dylan Tighe’s RECORD, an autobiographical work detailing Tighe’s experience with Ireland’s psychiatric system. It interrogates the relationship between the political and ethical in terms of madness. It argues against the notion that an ethical encounter develops automatically through the presence of the performer. Instead, it suggests such an encounter is inculcated through the particular aesthetic and political structure of the performance. The article analyses how RECORD uses and positions multiple forms of silence against one another to achieve such an effect. It notes how through the silence of RECORD, aesthetic interpretation of Tighe becomes ethically loaded.

Transformation from Real-Centredness to Other-Centredness: A Levinasian Re-Appraisal of John Hick’s Religious Pluralism

John Hick’s theory of religious pluralism has from its birth faced critiques regarding both its conceptual framework and its religious outlook; yet even so, his philosophy continues to challenge us to strive for a greater sense of openness and equality as regards other faiths that conflict with our own. The viability of Hick’s teaching today depends on a re-appraisal that enables it to surmount its theoretical difficulties. In this paper, we re-evaluate Hick’s philosophy of religion, focusing on the underlying ethical importance of his claim regarding soteriological transformation. Despite the problematic notion of the noumenal Real and its role in religious pluralism, the soteriological transformation claimed by Hick, which goes from self-centredness toward Real-centredness, reveals a commitment to self-opening and compassion towards the others. Yet we will argue that Hick only gives this ethical importance a secondary status in his philosophy of religion, which leaves open the question of the nature of the causality between the ultimate Reality and this ethical commitment. We thereby engage with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, in search of an ethical dimension with a characteristic of infinity, which can offer religious pluralism a transcendent foundation without disregarding ethical primacy. Following Levinas, we will argue for a further transformation from reality-centredness towards other-centredness, by which messianic peace would take the place of ultimate Reality as the teleological value underpinning religious pluralism.

Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600. Ryan McDermott. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+432.

<i>Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600</i>. Ryan McDermott. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+432.

Bergoglio among the Phenomenologists: Encounter, Otherness, and Church in Evangelii gaudium and Amoris laetitia

Abstract Because Jorge Bergoglio’s (Pope Francis’s) pontifical texts depart from his predecessor’s Thomistic vocabulary, critics claim his works deploy an “improvisational” style. Closer analysis reveals, however, that Francis deploys the terminology of French phenomenology after the “theological turn.” In fact, Evangelii gaudium and Amoris laetitia frame the event of interpersonal encounter using three concepts drawn from Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophical projects: the gaze, the face, and the other. Without ruling out a direct textual influence, I argue that Bergoglio’s theology of encounter highlights recent phenomenology’s implications for Catholic moral theology and ecclesiology. Faith is born of an encounter with the merciful gaze of a specific other - Jesus Christ. The Church, as the community that bears witness to this gaze, is thus called to eniconize this same gaze for “the least of these” (Matt 25:40). Not obviating the need for moral precepts, the encounter with the particular other becomes the condition of their possibility; moral norms only cohere within the context of the pastoral “face-to-face.” The main ecclesiological consequence of the “pastoral turn” Bergoglio initiates is thus a “kerygmatic hermeneutic” of the Church: the community of believers turns outward to encounter the other in mercy, evangelizing by example and charity.

Where the Earth Folded

Abstract“Gespräch im Gebirg” (“Conversation in the Mountains”), Paul Celan’s only prose piece published during his lifetime, is often described as failed conversation, paradoxical or undecided in language and structure. Points of reference are frequently a dialogic structure of “I” and “thou” in light of Émile Benveniste, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Heidegger, or Celan’s missed encounter with Theodor W. Adorno. It has, however, largely gone unremarked that Celan undertook an intensive reading of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Monadology in August 1959, at the same time that his manuscripts show he was working on “Conversation.” In Leibniz Celan discovers the fold as the underlying principle of the monad, and, as the article shows, the figure of the fold pervades the imagery, the language, and the structure of “Conversation.” Celan uses the fold as a radically new literary form, as a nonindexical linguistic device to resist the harm and violence brought about through a language used for classification and delineation, and as a poetic figure to write an impossible conversation into existence.

De Outro Modo Que Ser: algumas observações quanto à tradução portuguesa de Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence

O presente artigo apresenta o cotejo realizado entre a obra original do filósofo lituano-francês Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, e sua versão em língua portuguesa, De outro modo que ser ou para lá da essência, primeira versão da obra no idioma de Camões. Esse texto apresenta as limitações da presente tradução, seja por trechos não traduzidos como de escolhas de tradução equivocadas. O texto original é sem dúvida deveras hermético, Levinas escreveu sua obra procurando uma linguagem própria, com uma linguagem que, na medida do possível, não estivesse contaminada pelo ser, pela ontologia. Para isso expressou-se do modo mais concreto possível sem que com isso sua expressão perde-se em rigor filosófico. A tradução, sem justificativa, desfez esse trabalho empreendido pelo autor que de modo algum é mero estilo literário, mas que constitui também o próprio conteúdo da obra.

The Temptation of Pedagogy: Levinas's Educational Thought from His Philosophical and Confessional Writings

In this paper I analyse the current trends in educational philosophy which utilise Emmanuel Levinas's thought. An ever-growing number of scholars have articulated many different aspects of his thought for educational purposes. I propose that there is a general split between these scholars, those who favour Levinas's philosophical writings and those who favour his confessional writings. I analyse the variegated theories presented by both of these trends and offer a critique largely based on the need for the incorporation of Levinas's complete writings in order to better understand what may be called his ‘educational thought’. Lastly, in order to demonstrate this approach, I offer a reading of his seminal lecture ‘The Temptation of Temptation’ with a focus on the pedagogical features of the Sinaitic revelation, while also demonstrating the proximity between his thought and different aspects of Jewish mysticism.

CZŁOWIEK I ŚMIERĆ – MIĘDZY SEPARACJĄ A BLISKOŚCIĄ

The author, in his paper, pays close attention to the uncontrolled dialectics ofdeath within human existence; that which is actively experienced but passivelysustained; is the end of everything but the beginning of something new; is absolutecertainty but unpredictable uncertainty; is always and only personal for me but always and only personal for others, too. In fact, it is very difficult to explain themeaning of death from an ontological study of death: if and how death exists in thearea of human experience; if death is an immanent possibility for personal existenceor, is it introduced from outwith and occurs when we are not still living. To respondto these questions, the author proposes to use the bridging term, with which variousphilosophical positions can be qualified. This bridging term is ‘distance’ and ourdeath experience is defined as the distance between man (person acting) and hissubject (experience). The dialectical nature of this experience implies that deathmight be through an infinite separation or an infinite closeness to man. Driftingbetween those faraway shores, we can find in Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy. Herefers to death as Other (something else for man), but this does not mean that deathis strange or unknown within one’s life experience.

The Gender Politics of Music and the Ineffable: On the Feminine in Jankelevitch and Levinas

ABSTRACTTranslated into English in 2004, Vladimir Jankelevitch’s book Music and the Ineffable has made a significant impact in anglophone musicology. I argue that the figure of the feminine is central to his understanding of music and musical ineffability, and use feminist philosophers’ interpretations and critiques of the figure of the feminine in his close friend and colleague Emmanuel Levinas’s work to unpack the gender politics of Jankelevitch’s book and the secondary literature on it. I focus on the figure of the feminine in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, which are works we have evidence Jankelevitch read. There, Levinas describes the feminine as a “form of being” that is “inexhaustible, infinite” and thus “refuses thematization positively” (Totality and Infinity, 296). This is nearly identical to Jankelevitch’s definition of musical ineffability as “fertile inexplicability” (Music and the Ineffable, 71). Not only is Jankelevitch’s concept of musical ineffability identical to Levinas’s concept of the feminine, it is also couched in gendered terms throughout Music and the Ineffable. “Musical ineffability” in Jankelevitch’s sense is thus a parallel to Levinas’s concept of the feminine. I then read Jankelevitch and his interpreters in musicology through feminist scholarship on Levinas to show how the former two succumb to the same ultimately patriarchal flaws as the latter. For example, just as Levinas prioritizes paternity and the reproduction of patriarchy, muiscologist Carolyn Abbate uses Jankelevitch as the white masculine other in which musicology recognizes itself as both different and the same.

“The Path that Leads to the One God, Must be walked in Part Without God”

In her well-known review of The Star of Redemption, poet, cultural critic, and philosopher Margarete Susman characterizes Rosenzweig’s project as theology that has “gone beyond the zenith of atheism” and articulates her view of this unique piece of work as the crowning achievement of the philosophical project of that time. But Susman’s assessment also addresses another issue of great significance: the fact that the atheism addressed by Rosenzweig’s book is the atheism of Goethe, and that the redemption that lies beyond this atheism becomes clear and gains voice only in light of the words of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, as we will see below. Susman’s assessment is consistent with Rosenzweig’s letter to Ehrenburg and identifies contending with atheism as a fundamental element of understanding The Star of Redemption. This article seeks a better understanding of Rosenzweig’s book based on Susman’s work. It also offers greater insight into Goethe’s significant role in the book and, in doing so, provides readers with a unique key for navigating the book that can also help understand the change in conception proposed by Rosenzweig in his Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus Lehrhaus (Free Jewish House of Learning). In this context, the word “free” has meaning on more than one level and can be understood as applying to both the House of Learning as an independent institution and to the freedom of human consciousness. This article is based largely on Susman’s review article on The Star of Redemption and her essay marking the celebratory publication of another installment of Rosenzweig and Buber’s German translation of the Bible. Here, however, I also seek to understand the deeper meaning of the claim regarding atheism’s role on the path to monotheism using the terms of Rosenzweig himself, as well as the language and thinking of Emmanuel Levinas.

Ethical Writing and Commemoration: Benjamin Fondane's ‘Preface in Prose’ and the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

The end of Benjamin Fondane's iconic poem, the ‘Préface en prose’, is inscribed at the entrance of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names. The quote is a resonant call to recognize the humanity of all victims in the poet's human countenance. This reference, among many other elements in this poem, prompts a comparison to Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy. The poem's speaker specifically resembles Levinas's ‘Other’. Contrary to Levinas, it is maintained that written discourse, and not just the face-to-face encounter, involves an ethical summons, implying a responsibility on the part of the reader: the responsibility to commemorate, in this case to commemorate the innocent humanity murdered in the Shoah.

Shankman, Steven Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (review)

REVIEWS 547 Shankman, Steven. Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2017. xiii + 169 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 (paperback). In 2004, Alain Toumayan wrote that Dostoevskii’s fiction ‘frames and heralds some of Levinas’s most creative, striking, and provocative formulas’ (Yale French Studies 104, p. 66). Yet given the obvious parallels between their lives and thought, comparisons with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas came relatively late to Dostoevskii studies. Levinas, who died in 1995, published his major treatises between 1960 and the mid-1980s. From 1941 to 1945, as a French POW, he was imprisoned in German labour camps; his experience echoes Dostoevskii’s five-year incarceration in a prison camp near Omsk in the 1850s. Despite renouncing theodicy in the aftermath of the Shoah, Levinas remained a practising Jew; Dostoevskii was a practising Orthodox Christian with a weakness for antisemitic propaganda. (In the book under review, Steven Shankman studies the troubling issue of Dostoevskii’s antisemitism with tact and insight.) Crucially, both thinkers maintained their faith in living ethically in a damaged world. Levinas often admitted his debt to Dostoevskii, attributing his interest in philosophy to his early love for Russian literature. He virtually fetishized (according to his French biographer) the famous line uttered by Father Zosima’s brother Markel in Brothers Karamazov: ‘Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than all the others.’ The notion that every individual is responsible (and therefore guilty) not just for their own acts, but also those of everyone else (all the Others), would become a central tenet of Levinas’s thought. While Steven Shankman is not the first scholar to read Dostoevskii through the lens of Levinas (he acknowledges the influence of Toumayan and Val Vinokur), his Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison is the first monograph to perform this exercise in the context of literature classes taught to Oregon State Penitentiary inmates and University of Oregon college students between 2007 and 2013. Instructing prisoners and college students together is a flagship project of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, in which Shankman participated. Happily, the slogan ‘Inside-Out’ matches Levinas’s expression of an important spiritual experience, the undermining of individual identity through being ‘turned inside-out’ (à l’envers) by exposure to someone else’s reality. In the first two chapters of this book, Shankman reconstructs Levinas’s complex and subtle ideas about moral responsibility, transcendence and illeity (approaching God through Others) from selected essays, interviews and key texts, as well as Shankman’s own readings of Jewish doctrine and rabbinical philosophy. As in his Inside-Out classes, Shankman then reads Dostoevskii’s letters and fiction and (in chapter five) Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate, for epiphanies and moral paradoxes that appear to anticipate Levinas’s teachings. He finds characters ‘turned inside-out’ in all Dostoevskii’s major SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 548 novels: Raskolnikov, by his love for Sonia; Prince Myshkin, by all human vulnerability; even Petr Stepanovich Verkhovenskii, by Stavrogin. Shankman argues that both Dostoevskii’s and Grossman’s characters act out the task proposed by Levinas of ‘thinking God on the basic of ethics’, that is, attempting to relate to the divine outside of conventional ontology. God, certainly for Levinas, and arguably for Dostoevskii, does not have being; rather, God is a way of doing. In the words of the camp inmate Ikonnikov, a character in Grossman’s Life and Fate, ‘There is neither God nor the Good, but there is goodness’. Levinas cited this line in conversation as essential to his own ‘thesis’; it is thoroughly and lucidly analysed in Turned Inside Out, with other ethical questions raised by Grossman’s novel (like Ikonnikov’s refusal to continue digging foundations for a building he knows will become a gas chamber for Jews, even at the cost of his own life; like Levinas, Ikonnikov accepts personal responsibility for the Other). Hence, by showing kindness to others, and attempting to act ethically, we can approach divine goodness even in a post-Karamazov, post-Shoah world where everything is, apparently, permitted. IfShankman’sstyleissomewhatteacherlyandponderous,thisiscompensated by the clarity and patience with...

Espaços de violência na narrativa moçambicana contemporânea

Em 2003, João Paulo Borges Coelho publica o seu primeiro romance, As duas sombras do rio, tendo por base acontecimentos verídicos ocorridos nas margens do Zambeze, entre 1985 e 1989. Sendo historiador, especializado em questões de segurança e defesa, o autor tem uma posição privilegiada no acesso à informação, o que levaria a supor tratar-se de uma narrativa histórica ou documental. Contudo, a acumulação de significações em suspenso faz escapar o romance à leitura unívoca de um relato e remete a percepção da violência trazida à superfície para um campo de incerteza e de questionamento que o autor desenvolveu em Campo de Trânsito, cuja ação decorre num campo de prisioneiros. Podem-se estabelecer analogias entre as duas narrativas ligadas por perspectivas filosóficas de Emmanuel Levinas.

Alteridade e educação: um diálogo intersubjetivo pelo viés da diversidade

This essay aims to promote a dialogue with sexual diversity in education, placing as challenge the construction of a culture open to multiple languages and differences, as a way to reduce prejudice, discrimination and learn with multiplicity in school. Based on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, we are provoked to learn from each other, towards the formation of a collective intelligence that promotes life and qualifies social and diverse knowledge, going beyond the repetition of historically constituted gender identities. The complexity of the task implies recognizing the other by means of actions that allow the emergence of biased immobilism, reconstructing pedagogical practices that express the richness of identities through cultural dialogue rethought with the possibilities of diversity and plurality.

Justice, subalternism, and literary justice: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

This article analyses Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) through the lens of justice: philosophical, legal, and literary. What is justice when its agent is subaltern — disprivileged by both caste and class — and delivers justice to himself? I argue that the fictional representation of class, caste, poverty, and violence can be similar to the structuring and translations of justice. By writing his novel from the perspective of a subaltern character, Adiga joins the call by Dalit critics to reconfigure modernity from the interests of the oppressed and the marginalized. In the process, there can be a rethinking of postcolonial literary criticism from within the postcolonial nation, rather than the established perspective of the postcolonial nation understanding its own colonial oppression. My essay provokes wider insights into the implications for justice and human rights as they are informed and represented by literary fiction, subaltern theory, and deconstructive theory. How can a writer conceive of and represent justice — literary justice — by working within and against philosophical and legal conceptions of justice? The philosophers and theorists I invoke include Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Wai Chee Dimock, Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, and Robert Young.

Consciousness in Re-Presentation: Towards a Cross-Textual Definition of “Différance”

The texts of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) are known for their meticulously measured language, a quality that leads many readers to pass over his work. it is often relegated to the margins of thought as ‘nonsense’ or elusive in meaning. this short piece attempts to offer a partial elucidation on some key themes of Jacques Derrida’s 1968 essay, “Différance.” This essay first contrasts différance, a French neo-graphism referring to the simultaneous processes of deferral and differentiation , with the prevalent motif of “presence” that has dominated large tracts of Western philosophical discourses. It then moves to discuss the possible structural and methodological ways in which one may read différance, ultimately working to place it into conversation with philosophies of consciousness, understood as a self-presence or a presence-to-oneself (présence à soi), mainly in conversation with the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995).

Heeding humanity in an age of electronic health records: Heidegger, Levinas, and Healthcare.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) required healthcare providers in the United States to adopt and demonstrate meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) by January 1, 2014. In many ways, EHRs mark a notable improvement over paper medical records as they are more easily accessible and allow for electronic searching and sharing of medical history. However, as EHRs have become mandated by ARRA, many nurses now rely upon computers far more heavily during nurse-patient interactions, thereby decreasing the level of direct interpersonal communication between the two. There is evidence that eye contact between nurses and patients positively affects patient satisfaction. Above and beyond the issue of patient satisfaction is the more basic ethical issue of respecting the patient as a person. The author argues that the templates used in electronic health systems have the possibility of eroding the respect for humanity that is the hallmark of nurse-patient relationships, as signalled by the American Nurses Association's first principle in their Code of Ethics. Using concepts from philosophers Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, the author provides guidance as to what an ethical interaction between nurse and patient should look like in an age of EHRs.

Emmanuel Levinas on hospitality: Ethical and Political aspects

The current refugee crisis poses the crucial question of hospitality [or hos(ti)pitality in Derridean terms] as the complex ethico-political question of welcoming the stranger in a globalized world. For Emmanuel Levinas, hospitality means ethical and by extension political responsibility for the absolute Other. Without doubt, this is the quintessence of the Levinasian ethical and political thought. It is noteworthy that this sui generis metaphysical ethics does not concern conventional moralism or charity either in the case of personal ethics or in the case of political ethics. In both cases, it chiefly concerns the foundation of world as a refugium, i.e. a threshold of unconditional justice. In a nutshell, this article try in the final analysis to indicate the critical fact, according to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical argumentation, that a public policy on refugee question should mainly be determined by the ethics of hospitality in the sense of the pure welcoming of the absolute Other. Undoubtedly, this form of ethico-political justice is worthy of the name

Power, Discourse, and Ethics

Despite Heinrich Popitz’s non-ideological, carefully descriptive account of how power is initiated and maintained, he too easily dismisses the Frankfurt School’s call for domination-free discourse as merely a subject for academic speculation. Because of his focus on the factual, Popitz neglects the possibility that ethical norms can challenge strategically-guided discourse even if only counterfactually. In addition, such norms are at work in the very discursive exchange represented by his writing his book for his readers and in that book’s aspiration to universal validity claims that run counter to strategic interests that tend to be particularistic. Popitz’s own conviction that power does not completely suppress freedom provides at least a space in which claims can be advanced and evaluated independently of strategic imperatives. Perhaps because Popitz’s approach is limited to describing the functioning of power, the underlying philosophical anthropology of his work is Hobbesian insofar as agents seek to subject others to asymmetrical power relationships and insofar as even the recognition one gives to another aims at retrieving recognition for oneself. A counter-asymmetry is to be found in Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological descriptions of the ethical summons of the other which provide a philosophical backdrop against which power is exercised and in which the first event of the interpersonal encounter is peace, not war.