Levinasian Reading Research Articles

Subjetividade em exposição

O presente artigo se propõe fazer uma leitura levinasiana do conto Amor de Clarice Lispector. Nele, pretendemos entender a epifania da personagem Ana como um evento de deposição ocasionado por uma perturbação em seu movimento interessado, ou seja, uma retirada de sua posição acomodada e de recolhimento no assento, expondo-a à fragilidade perante o arranque do bonde. Nesse evento, o rosto do cego a perturba tanto por sua fragilidade, quanto por sua não-reciprocidade por ser cego. Essa crise do compreensivo, dada pela escuridão da cegueira, revela a Ana um anonimato e desamparo próprios frente à neutralidade do verbo ser, que é puro haver, verbo sem substantivo, assim lhe causando náusea e o desespero de uma fuga. Ao mesmo tempo, essa visão do cego abre a ela uma dimensão de responsabilização infinita com a fragilidade do Outro, colocando-a assim em contato com uma alteridade que ultrapassa o circuito de sua mesmidade. Ao perceber a nudez do rosto do cego, Ana se vê também exposta e eleita, estabelecendo-se aí uma relação de assimetria.

‘Need’ and ‘Desire’ in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Mawlana's Ghazals

Abstract This article aims at a comparative reading of a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets and Mawlana's ghazals from a Levinasian perspective. We will argue how Shakespeare and Mawlana (Rumi) both represent an ethical relationship with the Other in their poems, where the needs and demands of the Other are prioritised. We will also contend that although Shakespeare's sonnets are not exclusively concerned with secular love or eroticism, they are closer to the Levinasian notion of desire or a-satiable desire in which transcendence becomes possible through need. On the other hand, Mawlana's ghazals in which need and erotic feelings are disparaged also warn about satiable desire and need. This is not to suggest that the results of this comparison can be extended to Shakespeare's sonnets and Mawlana's ghazals in general, but that a similar Levinasian reading is occasionally possible and might shed new light on connections between English and Persian lyric poetry.

Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature ed. by Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen

Reviewed by: Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature ed. by Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen Jacob Emery Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature. Ed. by Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen. Cambridge: Open Book. 2021. xvii+302 pp. £29.95. ISBN 978–1–80064–120–4. From the first pages of its brilliant Introduction, this volume makes plain the blind spots in received notions of intertextuality and argues persuasively for reading out [End Page 529] of sequence. A genealogical scheme in which elements pass from origin texts to successors falsifies the experience of literature in crucial respects. For example, a reader initially acculturated to contemporary fiction approaches literature of prior epochs through paradigms derived from modern writing; hermeneutic frameworks such as the fourfold exegesis of medieval scholars assume a textual structure of anticipation rather than recollection; and coincidence often registers as meaningful resonance for readers who recognize commonalities across authors who could not have known of one another. The intertextual methodologies that take pride of place in doctoral examinations may have various institutional advantages, but they sideline essential intuitions of comparative literature. In their framing essay, editors Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen build on the Oulipian observation that all texts possess incidental features, any of which might conceivably reappear as purposive qualities in a future text, to offer a genuinely exciting and insightful account of literature: rigorously theorized, slightly perverse, charged with appreciation for the fictional word, and worked into an informative and splendidly argued panorama of ramifications. The essays that follow, which are of consistently high quality and intellectual daring, provide proof of the concept, and the fact that one or two of the strongest among them would probably be mutilated into insignificance by the peer-review process is a powerful indictment of academic narrow-mindedness. The body of the collection is organized around the canonical figures of Nikolai Gogolʹ, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Lev Tolstoi. Langen's lively and sprawling triangulation of Gogolʹ with Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and Flann O'Brien (all three theorists of anticipatory plagiarism after a fashion) is a standout, as is Ilya Vinitsky's intermedial treasure hunt 'Seeing Backwards: Raphael's Portrait of Nikolai Vasilʹevich Gogolʹ. In the section on Dostoevskii, which is devoted to authors who openly exploit Dostevskian subtexts, two pieces lapse into intertextual exploration in which the conceit of anticipatory plagiarism is largely ornamental; in the third, Inna Tigountsova acknowledges modern literature's evident debt to Dostoevskii by imagining a far-future reader for whom the surviving fragments of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature have come to seem a single corpus with members produced over the course of several centuries, something like the Homeric Hymns. Moving on to Tolstoi, we find a Levinasian reading by Steven Shankman; Maguire's highly entertaining essay on the reciprocal echoes between Tolstoi and popular novelist Hall Caine; and Svetlana Yefimenko's provocative contribution to the dispute between epic and novel, which suggests that Homer's Achilles makes better sense if he is read as having interiority of the kind ascribed to Tolstoi's Bolkonskii—in other words, that the atypical features of this epic hero become perfectly legible when read as an anachronistic feature of another genre of another age. The conceit of anticipatory plagiarism seems most bracing and fecund when the authors under discussion could not have known each other or when they write in radically different genres. In the face of demonstrable influence, scholars often revert to presumptions of cause and effect that do not disturb received methodologies in any essential way. Eric Naiman in his excellent Afterword worries that 'influence backwards can begin to resemble a kind of scholarly pig-Latin [. . .] [End Page 530] reminiscent of a game show where all the answers have to be phrased as questions' (p. 226)—but goes on to justify the enterprise with a sequence of dazzling aperçus that show anticipatory plagiarism to be embedded in the projects of Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Nabokov, and Proust. A vital rethinking of intertextuality by and for people who are alive to the literary imagination, this anthology maintains a high standard, occasionally surpassed by its most brilliant members, and deserves a fruitful afterlife...

Fate, Need and Responsibility: A Levinasian Reading

The world of differences provides various outlooks and perspectives, such as ideological dissimilarities in human beings’ lives, and, therefore, people may experience distinctive challenges in contact with others. With a concrete realization of the phenomenon and how to respond to any external and internal force, any unique individual may start to think of the bases and formulation of such incidents. Everyone’s outlook and the method of analysis would be distinctive based on their experiences, gender, belief, religion, age, and other possible factors, and consequently, the structure of their standpoint would be divergent. The current study aims to reveal how people may respond to the happenings around them by relying on their experiences, beliefs, needs, and outlooks throughout their lives within a philosophical context. In this respect, three notions of “Fate and Belief,” “Need,” and “Responsibility” will be discussed in the light of Emanuel Levinas’ philosophical perspective throughout this research. Thus, this study intends to illustrate how people might face miseries and difficulties in their lives and daily encounters with ethical notion deficiencies. Gaining analytical power on the matters through various practices, one would be equipped with a bearable, easier, and better life.

The Ethical Value of the Inhumanity in Art A Levinasian Reading


 
 
 Reality and its Shadow, a brief yet powerful essay written in 1948, is the only text where Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) deals solely with the ontology of art. Already in this early text, we can see how his understanding that ethics is the ground of philosophy drives his discussion. The nature of art is therefore treated in relation to what it does, ethically, to the subject, the maker, and the viewer. Art is the “inhumanity” and “inversion” of ethics. Only philosophical criticism reintegrates its “inhumanity” in the ethical relation. The strength of Levinas’s philosophy issues from a pre-cognitive commitment to the “other”, epitomised in the “face to face” relation. Any philosophy emphasising the primacy of the subject over and above the “other” crumbles under his reading. Yet this same strength implies that those domains where the “face to face” relation is obscured lead to irresponsibility. One such domain is art. In this essay I argue that by applying his mature work to the criticism he advances in Reality and its Shadow we can find ethical value in art in virtue of its “inhumanity” and “inversion”. That is, we can agree with Levinas that art leads to irresponsibility, and yet ascribe to it positive ethical value in Levinas's own terms. This can help concretise the tension between the ethical and unethical aspects of art within a Levinasian framework.
 
 

Hospitality in Walt Whitman's Specimen Days

This article explores the concept of hospitality in Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (1882). The article is informed by a Levinasian reading of the concept since the main argument is that Lévinas’ interpretation of hospitality sheds light on Whitman’s years in Washington during the Civil War and his much debated relation with wounded soldiers. Lévinas’ phenomenology is centered on care of the Other, which leads to the question of how far the self’s personal obligation to respond to the other in need actually extends. Whitman wanted to create a persona that was meaningful and useful in the Civil War and he chose to be a nurse, or, as he called it in a poem, “the wound-dresser”. By writing about the Civil War, he would both put himself in the center of the historical moment and support Lincoln’s decision to fight the South. In Specimen Days he wanted to write a memorandum of the war that rejected the ‘sanitized’ versions already circulating. He focused on Union soldiers, who were representative of the best American qualities in Whitman’s view and who endured the hardships of the war, the injuries, pain and death included, but he also described the Southern soldiers, who were the ‘ghosts’ of the Union during the Civil War.

The Face/Facelessness of the Other—A Levinasian Reading of the Ethical of the Zhuangzi

Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical phenomenology offers a new understanding of what constitutes the core issue of ethics. For Levinas, the word “ethics” becomes a question about the “wholly Other,” the entity that challenges the self- qua -being, thus diverging from the traditional ontological framework of Being in the West, that is, sameness or totality. At first glance, Zhuangzi seems to have little in common with Levinas: The former irreverently mocks all moral principles and ethical norms whereas the latter takes ethics as first philosophy; the former speaks of the faceless as the model of Daoist authenticity whereas the latter speaks of the face as the symbol of moral obligation. Nevertheless, there are plenty of chapters in the Zhuangzi which illustrate how a self-being experiences a profound transfiguration through its encounter with the Other, a constellation which resonates with Levinas’ theme. In this paper, the issue of relationality in the Zhuangzi will be analyzed in light of Levinas’ espousal of alterity, with the purpose of explicating the Daoist appropriation of what I will call “the philosophy of difference.” I will submit the argument that the Zhuangzian notion of freedom and the Daoist conception of a well-lived life are both based upon this philosophy of difference. I will also argue that Daoist ethics, particularly the version expressed by the Zhuangzi , is best understood as a form of “negative ethics.”

The Betrayal of Love: The Golden Bowl and Levinasian Ethics

James’s novels have always elicited ethical thought, but the inadequacy of traditional ethics is revealed by the split among readers of The Golden Bowl in their judgments of Maggie’s character. R. P. Blackmur was right to call the true plot the “ineluctable,” which I take to mean the ethical, but on a register that cannot be reduced to a thematic reading, which would deal with what Emmanuel Levinas calls the shadow of reality and Blackmur the mechanical plot. An Aristotlean thematics and ethics serve as our mechanical plot, but the ineluctable demands a Levinasian reading if we are to be responsible to the true plot and James’s vision.

Messianism’s contribution to political philosophy: peace and war in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity

This article examines the impact of messianic thought on political philosophy in the theory of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). Levinas’s work enables us to consider the political not only in terms of contemplation of the tension between the political and the ethical and of the ethical limits of politics but as an attempt to create ethical political thought. Discussion of the tension between the political and the ethical intensifies in wartime and in the context of militaristic thinking. At the same time, it lends itself to new meanings of peace. At the heart of this article lies an examination of the role of the political discourse articulated in Levinas’s influential work Totality and Infinity and of the possibility of understanding this discourse in light of the Levinasian reading of the Talmud.

Music and Ethical Responsibility by Jeff R. Warren (review)

Music and Ethical Responsibility. By Jeff R. Warren. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [x, 205 p. ISBN 9781107043947 (hardcover), $90; ISBN 9781107358287 (e-book, Cambridge Books Online).] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Although bubbling nearly surface, in retrospect ethical goals of new musicological critiques have perhaps been under-articulated: surely central point of their critiques was that positivist musicology and theory and analysis were in some sense unethical or amoral, and that, once replaced, a more just musical-academic society would emerge. After exhaustion--or absorption--of new musicology, however, most music academics seem have declined articulate ethical foundations of their scholarship. As musicologists and theorists search for ways forward after hermeneutic critiques of new musicology, phenomenological approaches music present an attractive area for further research, promising take individuals' experiences of music seriously, locate meaning in those experiences, harness power of philosophy for addressing concerns, and, as expressed by Jeff R. Warren in Music and Ethical Responsibility, install ethics at center of experience. Warren's stated aim is argue that musical involves with others, and ethical responsibilities arise from these encounters (p. 1). This Levinasian thesis should lead Warren display his interactions with music and others or as an other by describing these experiences. Emmanuel Levinas's most fundamental argument is that all of my is ethical because it most fundamentally involves with others--to whom I am beholden and limitlessly subordinate, whom I show concern and care in an asymmetrical relation of giftgiving, alterity of whom 1 cannot absorb into myself--which displaces metaphysics as foundation for philosophy and instead establishes ethics in that foundational role. Part of beauty of phenomenological discourses is their ability describe experiences, descriptions which do much of intellectual work of argumentation, through evocation, through searching out unheard. Following Levinas, Warren's argument should unfold by describing many of ways in which unfolds ethically for him. But we must wait until pages 104 107 hear what experiences sound like for Warren. scene is a small jazz gig at a corporate gathering during which Warren plays double bass for standard The Blue Room. We would expect Warren's description of this unfold, in a Levinasian reading, from his with either music-as-other, his bandmates-as-others, or audience-as-other, and emphasize slippages and irreducibility of this encounter, music's strangeness, whence arrives its lesson: I am not knowable, thus you must respond ethically, with hospitality and yet distance afforded stranger. His own acts of analytical writing, too, might be placed under pressure, as they fail--yet wonderfully--to capture his fleeting experiences with quintessentially temporal art form. But Warren's description--by his own (p. 104 n. 10)--dispenses with messiness of any actual improvised experience, and instead reconstructs an idealized performance with him at its center. Warren undertakes such a reconstruction in order to make description of improvisation reflect lived of improvisation, instead of relying on a theoretical ideal of what improvisation is, but he admits that his account is fictional (p. 107), which we might normally take be, precisely, theoretical--that which is not experiential. Indeed, we discover that Warren's concern is not with any inimitable, non-repeatable experiences of music, but rather with what he calls the experience of music. This locution updates the ear as seat of cognition and knowledge of music, but at cost, I would argue, of a phenomenology that can do justice what must surely be Warren's own complexity of and that can serve as foundation for a Levinasian reading of ethics. …

The Face of the Dead Other: A Levinasian Reading of Contemporary Israeli Novels by A.B. Yehoshua and Shifra Horn

The Face of the Dead Other: A Levinasian Reading of Contemporary Israeli Novels by A.B. Yehoshua and Shifra Horn

Fighting for the Other's Rights First: Levinasian Perspectives on Occupy Gezi's Standing Protest

This essay re-explores the tie between ethics and politics in the thought of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas and is specifically concerned with the political consequences that might be drawn from his unique account of ethics. In response to Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani's recent reading of Levinasian politics as ethicoliberatory praxis, this essay attempts to exemplify such politics in relation to the silent standing protest that occurred throughout Occupy Gezi. As will be illustrated, this particular form of protest was symbolic of a struggle that was not tied to a classical notion of autonomous agency, but partially arose from ‘radical passivity’. It will be suggested that the protester's tacit participation in a shared endeavour to create responsive idioms for the Other can exemplify Levinasian ‘response-ability’ as a concrete praxis. Relying on Levinasian terminology, I suggest that Occupy Gezi's forms of silent protest created an ‘un-said Saying’ that disturbed the realm of politics from an ethical stance. Alongside a Levinasian reading, the protester's performed standstill will be explored in relation to what Butler and Athanasiou term ‘two senses of dispossession’ together with the concept implied by the Greek στα´σις [stasis]. As I contend, stasis manages to escape from the principle of non-contradiction in Being through integrating Being's Other in implicating both movement and stillness, activity and passivity. Hereby, stasis potentially points to an-other peace before politics, thereby offering a prolific alternative to the classic Hobbesian account of a dichotomy between war and peace.

Transcendence or destructiveness: a Levinasian reading of Peter Carey's Bliss

Transcendence or destructiveness: a Levinasian reading of Peter Carey's Bliss

Relation and Responsibility: A Levinasian Reading ofKing Lear

Relation and Responsibility: A Levinasian Reading of<i>King Lear</i>

Otherness and the Renewal of Freedom in Jarmusch's Down by Law : A Levinasian and Arendtian Reading

In this essay I argue that Down by Law (Jarmusch, 1986) is about how the encounter with otherness renews freedom and American identity. I first develop the idea of renewal through otherness by way of a discussion of Levinas' philosophy of freedom and Arendt's notion natality, contrasting it with the idea of negative liberty, which I explicate through a discussion of Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, and Tocqueville. Next, I show how negative liberty is engrained in the idea of America through a discussion of the formative American motifs of the road and the prison, which play structuring roles in Down by Law . I then try to show how the immigrant character of Bob (Roberto Benigni) is an other who liberates the American characters of Jack (John Lurie) and Zack (Tom Waits), who are existentially 'imprisoned' by their negative liberty.

Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies

Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies

Failure of Communication in Face-to-Face Encounter in The Zoo Story: A Levinasian Reading

Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (1961) is a perfect example of Levinasian face-to-face encounter in American society. In this one-act play, Albee depicts failure of communication in American life. This article intends to examine the failure of communication in face-to-face encounter in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story from Levinasian ethical perspective. The present article attempts to investigate the failed communication in this play through Levinas’s ethical notions of “face”, “responsibility” and “love”. It also discusses Levinas’s view about language and his distinction of ethical language which he calls “Saying” and ontological language which he terms “Said”.

A Levinasian Approach to Whistleblowing

This article draws on the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to offer a fresh insight into the law’s response to the issue of whistleblowing. In order to achieve this we briefly outline the main themes of his philosophy of otherness which insists that the very essence of ethics springs from the subjection (a succumbing) of the Subject to the ethical call of the Other. We provide a short description of the UK law on whistleblowing before undertaking a Levinasian reading of a particular case in order to consider the dilemma that confronts the judge in framing an ethical response to the whistleblower as Other.

Lorna's Silence and Levinas's ethical alternative: form and viewer in the Dardenne Brothers

This paper explores the possibilities of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical description of the ethical life for understanding the experience of viewing a film, and this with two related goals in mind. The first is to provide a sustained Levinasian reading of the Dardenne Brothers' Lorna's Silence as an alternative to political or traditionally ethical approaches. This is necessary because the sensuous quality of Lorna's moral conversion is best understood through a set of metaphors used by Levinas to describe his ‘pre-ontological’ ethical philosophy: metaphors of the caress, the feminine and maternity. A second goal is to account for how this film's formal qualities create an encounter between viewer and film that echoes Lorna's encounters in the fictional world. To this end, the paper squares Levinasian ethics with André Bazin's realism by trimming from Bazin's work the notion of a gathered, individual subjectivity and emphasizing themes of encounter and dislocation. Lorna's Silence gives a fresh illustration of the cinema's power to encourage viewers to strive toward an altruistic notion of human relations.

Predicaments of history and mimetic agency: Postcolonial return, repetition and remediation in Rang De Basanti

The intersecting of time, history, narrative and subjectivity unfolds an intermeshed trajectory of notions about history's role in shaping views about nationalism and identity in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's popular film, Rang De Basanti (2006). This article addresses a confluence of the pedagogic and the performative modes of history in relation to nationalism and modernity in the film. History, taught via return, is experienced as otherness and eventually performed via a remediation of this otherness, thereby making it relevant to contemporary times. Offering diverse theoretical arguments about history and its narration, I also propose that history, although laden with mimetic impulses and desires for the male characters, excludes the women from mimetic agency. A Levinasian reading of the film's conclusion ultimately resolves the confines of historical determinism and reveals an aesthetic of mimeticism premised on ethical desire for transformative imperative that effectively displays history's otherness as well as its subjective performance.