Levinas's Ethics Research Articles

Levinas on Face A Preliminary Exploration of Levinas's Ethical Phenomenology

According to Levinas, there exists a totalizing characteristic within the Western philosophical tradition that reduces the other to sameness. This subjectification of the other implies a violence towards the other. In resistance to this totalizing violence, Levinas endeavors to construct a theory with ethics as the first philosophy. By introducing an absolutely external other and shifting the focus from the "self" in phenomenology towards the absolute heterogeneity of the "other," Levinas establishes an ethics of the other. This is built on the foundation of a "face-to-face" relationship, creating a framework where the ego bear an infinite responsibility towards the other. On one hand, the other disrupts my exclusive possession of the world through the presence of their face, rejecting my conceptual grasp. On the other hand, through discourse, the other makes an ethical plea to the ego, and the ego bear an absolute responsibility towards the other, becoming a "hostage" to the other. The central theme of Levinas's ethics is the other, focusing on the primal experience of face-to-face encounters where the other precedes my understanding of existence and knowledge objects.

Evaluation of Simon Critchley's Comments on Kant and Levinas's Ethics

Kant ve Levinas etik görüşleri söz konusu edildiğinde ciddi bir analizi hak etmektedirler. Bu çalışmada böyle bir çabayı kendisine özgü bir bağlamda gündeme getiren Critchley’in görüşlerini eleştirel bir şekilde incelemek ve zengin bir felsefi zeminde tartışmaya açmak hedeflenmektedir. Etik üzerine yürüttüğü çalışmalarla bilinen Critchley, eyleme neden olan şey ister Kant’ın felsefesinde olduğu gibi kişinin kendi yetileri isterse de Levinas’ın görüşlerinde olduğu gibi dışsal bir güç olsun ilgili ahlaki talebin onaylamasıyla başlayan ve öznenin gerilimine işaret eden etik bir deneyimden söz etmektedir. Bu görüşün benzer biçimlerinin ilgili filozoflarda da bulunduğunu iddia eden Critchley’in bu iddialarını tanıtmak ve eleştirel bir biçimde incelemek çalışmanın temel amacıdır.

Vulnérabilités, responsabilité éthique et accueil de l’altérité durant le premier confinement de la crise sanitaire Covid 19 : l’exemple d’un Centre de Soin d’Accompagnement et de Prévention en Addictologie

Le premier confinement de la crise sanitaire Covid 19 a bouleversé les pratiques médicales et soignantes, avec une priorisation des patients positifs à la Covid et une focalisation sur les flux en réanimation. Or, dans les Centres de Soin d’Accompagnement et de Prévention en Addictologie (CSAPA), la dimension relationnelle du soin est centrale. Les professionnels de santé ont été impactés par les protocoles contraignants en matière d’asepsie, avec un risque de rupture de suivi accru chez des patients déjà vulnérables. À partir du cas du CSAPA de Grasse, l’article vise premièrement à analyser rétrospectivement les tensions éthiques rencontrées autour de l’accueil de l’altérité de ces patients aux problématiques complexes et deuxièmement à mettre en lumière l’inventivité des soignants dans leurs pratiques quotidiennes. L’approche développée est philosophique et conceptuelle, centrée sur la philosophie d’E. Levinas et son éthique du « visage » car la crise a exacerbé des tensions éthiques préexistantes autour de l’intersubjectivité. Les soignants ont dû faire face à une « responsabilité pour autrui », elle aussi renforcée. Mais la crise a pu aussi être l’occasion de réinvestir le soin relationnel, en se détachant du primat de la vue: le masque a tantôt aidé tantôt entravé le soin relationnel, mettant au jour la vulnérabilité partagée des soignants et des soignés. La crise sanitaire nous rappelle que la vigilance est toujours de mise vis-à-vis des risques de déshumanisation de la relation de soin.

The worst, the lesser violence and the politics of deconstruction

The characterisation of Derrida’s politics as a seeking for the “lesser violence” has become an almost paradigmatic interpretation. Yet the phrase la moindre violence appears only in the early essay “Violence and Metaphysics” and its meaning is not as straightforward as might initially seem. I will argue that it is a mistake to take this expression to summarise the political import of this essay let alone of deconstruction more generally. What Derrida repeatedly concerns himself on that occasion is not “the lesser violence” but “worse violence” and “the worst violence,” terms that appears several times. This will be seen to be as a prefiguring of how, from the early 1980s on, following engagements with Plato and Lyotard, Derrida repeatedly names and elaborates “the worst” as that which we should seek to avoid. In order to uncover the politics of deconstruction, I will examine what Derrida has to say about “the worst” as well as what is said in the secondary literature, for it is also a term around which a number of unfortunate misinterpretations have arisen. In conclusion, it will be remarked that with the late coinage of the term aimance Derrida makes clear his close proximity to the ethics of Levinas and his affirmation of an aspiration to nonviolence in the relationship with the other.

Editors’ Introduction

As this issue of the Journal of Jewish Ethics goes to press, the editors (and a good portion of the editorial board) have just arrived home from the Society of Jewish Ethics annual meeting in Chicago. For the first time since January of 2020, SJE members met in person, alongside scholars and activists from the Society of Christian Ethics and the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. We heard presentations and panel discussions on religious freedom, reproductive ethics, natural law, the politics of repentance, and Jewish ethics in comparative historical perspective, among many others. And although the SJE is a relatively small scholarly society, the lively sounds of spirited conversation and debate at the end of each session suggested a much larger gathering.Like the SJE annual meeting, this journal features some of the most compelling, creative, or, indeed, controversial research in contemporary Jewish ethics—a field that includes serious attention to classical Jewish sources, history, and contemporary ethical and political thought, as well as an ongoing critical evaluation of the relationship between these.The first two articles in this issue consider ethical questions around Covid-19 vaccination, reflecting the amount of scholarship emerging on this most immediate of topics—recognizing too that the tragedies and controversies of Covid-19 may well be relevant to other, as-yet-unseen, future health crises. Ranana Leigh Dine’s essay, “Publicizing the Miracle of Vaccination,” focuses not on the ethics of vaccination itself, but the ethics of sharing one’s own vaccination status through the thoroughly contemporary phenomenon of the “vaccine selfie.” Dine creatively draws on the Hanukkah theme of pirsumei nisa, “publicizing the miracle,” alongside the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Mara Benjamin to argue that the vaccine selfie might contribute to a Jewish “visual ethics” of thanksgiving and embodied obligation. The essay by Zohar Lederman, Shmuel Lederman, and Ghada Majadli, meanwhile, offers a public health analysis of vaccination amid geopolitical conflict, arguing that the state of Israel has a specific ethical obligation to provide Covid-19 vaccines to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.The second pair of articles in this issue return to major thinkers in modern Jewish philosophy. Simeon Theojaya’s essay considers the source of ethics in Levinas and Kant, noting that both emphasize the pressing nature of ethics even as their philosophical foundations differ, and analyzing Levinas’s notion of “proximity” to the Other as a powerful foundation for ethical response. Vincent Calabrese performs a critical analysis of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writings on halakhah, or Jewish law, and considers the relationship between such law and contemporary constructive work in Jewish ethics and thought.This issue also features three book reviews on a pleasingly diverse array of topics, from a sweeping overview of Jewish ethical and moral queries to a biography of an influential and violent rabbi. These works, and their thoughtful reviews, testify to the broad spectrum of scholarship that might fall under the category of Jewish ethics. Such ongoing scholarship allows our conversations to continue long after the academic conferences have finished.

Ethical vulnerability analysis and unconditional hospitality in times of COVID-19: rethinking social welfare provision for asylum seekers in Scotland

AbstractWe deploy a novel and radical approach to vulnerability theory to investigate Scotland's response to asylum seekers’ vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic and test Scotland's self-affirmation as a hospitable country. Our ethical vulnerability analysis enhances Fineman's vulnerability analysis by denationalising the vulnerable subject and locating her within our ‘uneven globalised world’. We further enrich this fuller version of vulnerability analysis with insights from Levinas's and Derrida's radical vulnerability theory and ethics of hospitality. We demonstrate how our ethical vulnerability analysis enables us to subvert the hostile premise of migration laws and policies, and thus fundamentally redefine relationships between guests and hosts so that the host is compelled to respond to the Other's vulnerability. We argue that this hospitable impulse yields a generous and absolute commitment to progressive social welfare provision for asylum seekers, which brings Scotland closer to fulfilling its aspirations to be a hospitable host by welcoming the Other.

Nursing and Ethics

Introduction. Emmanuel Levinas' ethics had an impact on Jean Watson's 1979 Theory of Human caring. Watson suggests that nursing ethics may be closest to the ethics of care as determined by Levinas. Aim. To establish arguments for and against abovementioned thinking. Methods. After an initial comparison of the statements made by Watson and the statements made by Levinas, a review of scientific articles was made to establish the link between nursing ethics and the ethics of Levinas. Results. About 20 articles and books were analyzed. A dozen references have been singled out to establish a link in argumentation, one paper presented a partial critique, while one suggested that nursing ethics should be based on some other ethical theory. Conclusion. Watson suggested that nursing ethics could be based on the ethics of Levinas. Since the 1990s some authors have made affirmative claims to this proposal, while others question the real possibility of its application in practice. Most authors agree that nursing ethics should not be based on the virtues of Christian charity, nor on deontological foundations or bioethical principlism. No other theory invokes that level of responsibility to another human being as Levinas does. Critics say his ethics are extremely abstract and as such are difficult to apply in a practical discipline such as nursing.

POSTHUMANISTIČKA ETIKA ODGOVORNOSTI: OD LEVINASA KA DRUGOM, KA NEHUMANOM

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the theoretical and conceptual connections between the philosophy of the Otherness by Emanuel Levinas and postulates established by the critical posthumanism theoreticians regarding the new humanism ethics. The starting point for this elaboration is the theory of responsibility for the Other developed by Levinas, which is understood as the basic principle of humanity, and therefore of the human subject as well. The responsibility for the Other is an immanence of being, instigated by the encounter with the face, the look and the touch of the Other. For Levinas, precisely these form the primary speech of humanity that one can express to the Other, becoming himself too in that expression. As posthumanism is a paradigm which brings the overcoming of the exclusivist principle of the traditional anthropocentric humanism, the notion of the Other has become a focal point for all the posthumanist discourses regarding the investigation of the essence of the human. Considering the fact that posthumanism tends to surpass all the dichotomies related to the Other – human or inhuman, configured differently in the racial, class, gender, biological or technological manner – we can confirm that posthumanism has restored the question of the responsibility for the Other and the necessity of his recognition without any tendency to assim- ilate, subjugate or eradicate it. Therefore the paper comparatively depicts and analyzes all the overlapping points of the new ethics of Levinas and the desired ethics of posthumanism overlap.

The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins (review)

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins Lee Chancey Olsen Brooke Rollins The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies. Ohio State UP, 2020. 230 p. In The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies, Brooke Rollins reads the classical rhetorical tradition against Jacques Derrida's ethics of otherness, and vice versa, to illustrate that the tradition, while oriented toward persuasive utilitarianism, carries considerable ethical weight and illuminates the transformative capacity of address and response. To put this differently, Ethics of Persuasion argues that the rhetorical tradition, often studied for and defined by its instrumentalist aspects, is shot through with ethical implications and imperatives. Also, as Rollins demonstrates, Derrida's ethico-philosophy is "powerfully rhetorical" (2), but not typically considered as such. The book will benefit scholars of rhetoric, pedagogy, ethics, and deconstruction—the last of these has been defined by Derrida, as Rollins notes, "as a turn towards the other" (26)—and it will serve well in graduate seminars on these topics. Rollins explicates usefully how Derrida's oeuvre extends earlier philosophers and theorists—Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of otherness and J. L. Austin's theories on speech acts and performativity, for example—in its formulation of an aporetic ethics of radical alterity in which subjects are interrupted, disturbed, and altered through encounters with and responses to others. The first chapter elucidates what Rollins calls Derrida's rhetorical ethics; the last chapter analyzes Derrida's eulogistic texts through this ethic-rhetorical lens. The other body chapters illustrate how various Derridean concepts—alterity, vulnerability, immunity, addressability and responsibility, hospitality, hostage, haunting, for example—allow new readings of classical rhetoric. The author examines specifically Gorgias, Lysias, [End Page 248] Isocrates, Plato, and earlier conceptions of persuasion and pedagogy, productively extending important critical, rhetorical, and pedagogical work by Michelle Ballif, Simon Critchley, Diane Davis, David Depew and Takis Poulakos, Debra Hawhee, H. I. Marrou, Natasha Seegert, Victor Vitanza, Jeffrey Walker, Lynn Worsham, and many others. As will be apparent to readers familiar with the work of Ballif, Critchley, Davis, and others, Ethics of Persuasion engages a broader, ongoing effort—sometimes identified as "the ethical turn"—to reclaim critical theory generally, and deconstruction specifically, from accusations of ethico-political detachment, relativism, excessive focus on textuality, and so on, in this case using Derrida to illustrate at once how his work is deeply ethical and how it illuminates the ethical dimensions of the aforementioned rhetoricians. But Rollins also helps to change the narrative by suggesting that other scholars of language have, in their extensive attention to persuasion, overlooked certain ethical, political, and ontological elements in the longer tradition. The author posits that scholars ought to attend more closely to issues of ethics, relationality, alterity, and subjectivity, especially as concerns knowledge production, discourse, and pedagogy because "each contributes to our thinking of what it means to address another [and] the ethical potential that underlies this address" (15). As a plea for a more ethical approach to persuasion and pedagogy, The Ethics of Persuasion feels especially timely, considering several recent disruptions to our collective lives. How many of us planned for a pandemic that would disrupt our lives, classrooms, and pedagogy, and increase our shared precarity? Scholars and instructors of rhetoric and ethics may be most interested in the fourth chapter, "Isocrates's Promise," which presents Isocrates—not Plato—as the true predecessor of the contemporary humanities. Rollins argues for a differently articulated legacy for Isocrates, one that incorporates an ethics of alterity, a more nuanced notion of unknowable futures, and a more complex approach to kairos. These points seem particularly apt, considering the uncertainties caused by Covid-19, climate change, and ongoing political economic violence worldwide—and considering our ongoing responsibility as scholars and educators to help others prepare for unknowable futures even as the humanities face budget cuts (or "austerity measures"), the ongoing neoliberalization of the academy, and so on. Extending the Isocratian tradition, Rollins champions a powerfully ethical, diverse, and self-validating vision of the humanities [End Page 249] that defies the conservative version espoused by, among others, William J. Bennett in The Book of Virtues (1993)—that is, a reactionary, elitist, xenophobic version that is increasingly...

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.

Indifference as resistance: Virginia Woolf's feminist ethics in Three Guineas

ABSTRACTFocusing on the significance of the term “indifference,” I argue that in her 1938 essay Three Guineas Virginia Woolf proposes strategies for resistance to fascism and war that anticipate Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of alterity. Starting with the issue of women's difference from men, Woolf develops a specifically feminist critique of enlightenment thought that stresses the potential of women as “outsiders,” and thereby challenges existing political positions. In this article, I trace the origins of indifference back to John Locke and other eighteenth-century thinkers to reveal the ethical and aesthetic potential of Woolf's call for women's critically disengaged response to the status quo. I emphasize the paradoxical nature of the “society of outsiders” to suggest that Woolf lays the groundwork for a queer and feminist modernist aesthetics, one that radically undermines the supposed split between progressive politics and high modernist form in the 1930s. Reaching beyond readings of Three Guineas that focus on the importance of affect, I argue instead for a full understanding of the political power of indifference.

Alterity in Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Levinas: From Ambiguity to Ambivalence

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.

‘Ethics is an Optics’: Ethical Practicality and the Exposure of Teaching

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.

The Rupture as Ethical Imperative: Reading thePhaedrusthrough Levinas's Ethics

ABSTRACTReading the Phaedrus through Levinas's ethics for the other, I argue that the dialogic rupture in the Phaedrus offers an ethical imperative for rhetoric to respect alterity. Following James Kastely, I suggest that attempts to create a unified understanding of the dialogues within the Phaedrus miss the way in which the thematic discontinuity of the text functions philosophically and performatively. This rupture, I posit, signifies an ethical stance toward alterity that forgoes the possibility of violence and respects plurality. Such an ethical stance offers an imperative for a rhetorical ethic of listening in dialogue and suggests that rhetorical scholars return to Plato as a valuable resource for theorizing rhetorical ethics.

ETIKA TANGGUNG JAWAB EMMANUEL LEVINAS

This article aims to know and critically analyze the ethical responsibilities of Levinas. He gives a new concept of responsibility. For him, ethics is the first philosophy. The ethics of Levinas's responsibilities must be understood in a metaphysical aspect. The research method used is literature research using hermeneutics method. The essence of Levinas’s responsibility: responsibility as an existential fact, nonnormative, for the others, substitutional, the essential structure of subjectivity, a basis for existence, the responsibility of humanizing himself, and responsibilities make me unique from others. The ethics of Levinas's responsibilities have two characters: concrete and asymmetric.

A critical analysis of dialogue in Levinas’ ethics

Levinas’s ethics has not been able to address the plethora of human challenges arising from the ethical quicksand and moral quandaries in our existential world. The problem of ethics in Levinas’ s philosophical cum phenomenological analysis, is the problem of human communication, social interaction, human emancipation, freedom, and existential/ metaphysical relations. Freedom has become not just a hot concept in different fields of study, but a very powerful and a driving concept. For Levinas, freedom is not just the absence of constraints or impediments but obedience to laws and even the laws of nature inclusive. This paper adopted the method of hermeneutic to critically analyze Levinas’s phenomenological ethics. This paper concludes by exposing the facts that human communication or interaction is based on understanding and the ethics of difference is part and parcel of inter-subjectivity. Dasein is always faced with the fulfilment in its lived temporality. A sharing of the world is an essential characteristics of human togetherness. Dasein, in its dialogical engagement and existential commitment is usually based on freedom, strife, world sharing and resistance. Dialogical philosophy is the foremost part of world’s cosmic law of concrete social network.

A Few Philosophical Remarks Regarding Lévinas Face Ethics in Online Social Networking

We live today in a world that depends on technology. The development of technology oblige us to find better ethics necessary to solve the new moral problems brought by the technology evolution. An example of such technologies are online social networking. These sites can be described as revolutionary technologies due to the fact that they have a huge political and social impact. As social impact of social networking sites grows so are the new ethical problems. The originality of this articles stands in the fact that is trying to prove that not all existent ethics can be applied to resolve new ethical problems brought by social networking. For example in online social networking Levinas Face Ethics cannot be applied because this ethics was made to described a real face-to-face meeting with the Other, not one intermediated by computers or avatars. To prove our point we construct arguments as sensitivity problem in Levinas ethics or the search of foundations of Levinas image ethics. We used arguments from mind philosophy to prove that Face can enter the virtual world as image, but Levinas image philosophy proves that image, photos, films or avatars have no moral statute. How to cite: Turculet, I. M. (2017). A Few Philosophical Remarks Regarding Levinas Face Ethics in Online Social Networking. Postmodern Openings , 8(1), 15-31, http://dx.doi.org/10.18662/po/2017.0801.02

Being with Others: Levinas and the Ethics of Autism

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...

Od estetskog ka etičkom - mit i metafora kao modus narativa kod Levinasa

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.

Gelbstint Kitą: karas ir taika Emmanuelio Levino filosofijoje

[straipsnis ir santrauka lietuvių kalba; santrauka anglų kalba] Šiame straipsnyje svarstoma karo ir taikos tema Emmanuelio Levino filosofijoje. Daugiausia dėmesio skiriama jo veikalui Totalybė ir begalybė (1961) ir siekiama parodyti, kad Levinas karą supranta kaip moralės suspendavimą. Teigiama, kad Levino filosofijoje karas atsiskleidžia, viena vertus, kaip istorinis įvykis, o antra vertus – kaip ontologinis principas. Savo ruožtu taika taip pat suprantama nevienodai – ir kaip opozicija karui, ir kaip eschatologija. Karo ir taikos santykis taip pat atskleidžia politikos ir etikos santykio problemą Levino filosofijoje. Šios temos savotiškai įrėmina Totalybę ir begalybę ir, jei totalybė yra karas, o begalybė – taika, alternatyvus šios knygos pavadinimas galėtų būti Karas ir taika.