Levinas's Philosophy Research Articles

W. G. Sebald and the Ethics of a Guilty Conscience

A glimpse of a mosque, a near collision with a pedestrian, a visit to an art gallery and the sighting of a historical building: these seemingly mundane travel experiences prepare the ground for W. G. Sebald's literary treatise on the politics and ethics of guilt in The Rings of Saturn. Sebald's reflections on the ethical limitations of responding to guilt in accordance with a good conscience, which evaluates its own transgressions, challenge the contemporary appetite for public apologies, suggesting, moreover, that such apologies are not good enough. Using Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy as a theoretical framework, I argue that Sebald foregrounds the affective properties of ethical guilt, depicting a protagonist whose bad conscience does not emerge from his self-assessment of culpability. Instead, the protagonist's bad conscience originates in his subjection to the needs of the past. The Rings of Saturn conveys the ontologically destabilizing affects of guilt through its own enigmatic utterances. The novel performs thus its own ethical treatise that it is the past, and not the present generation's interpretation of the past, which writes itself as guilt-evoking traces on the surfaces of the physical, mental and temporal landscapes that we inhabit.

Bearing Wit(h)ness: “Just Emotions” and Ethical Choices in Chris Cleave's Little Bee

My essay focuses on Chris Cleave's novel Little Bee/The Other Hand as a fertile ground for exploring the ethical and political grounds on which cross-cultural encounters take place. Bringing Sara Ahmed's theory of the cultural politics of emotion in conjunction with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ethics, I argue that, in addition to underscoring one's responsibility for, or in the face of the other, Cleave taps into the novel's potential for transforming consciousness by mobilizing what Ahmed has called “just emotions”: those emotions that show not only the effects of injustice, in the form of scars, but also open up the possibility of healing and recovery.

Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies by Celine Parreñas Shimizu (review)

Reviewed by: Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies by Celine Parreñas Shimizu Harrod J. Suarez (bio) Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies, by Celine Parreñas Shimizu. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012. xiii + 296 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780804773010. Han Lee, the Korean American owner of the Williamsburg Diner in the current prime-time CBS sitcom Two Broke Girls, plays a key role in the negative reviews the show has received. In "Yo, Is This Racist? 2 Broke Girls and the New Long Duk Dong We Never Asked For," blogger Andrew Ti writes that Lee is a "tiny, greedy, sexless man-child" who fulfills "every possible Yellow Panic stereotype with an actually fairly impressive level of thoroughness."1 Ti attempts to account for the long history of racist depictions of Asian Americans, but by generalizing Lee's masculinity, he appears to exclude and dismiss other powerful stereotypes, such as those that construct Asian American femininity. The strategy is hardly new: How often have similar attempts to critique racialized masculinity depended on marking femininity, and homosexuality, as forgettable and otherwise undesirable positions? Is there anything to be gotten from "asking for" Long Duk Dong, the stereotypical Asian immigrant character from the 1984 hit film Sixteen Candles, whom Ti cites as an antecedent for Lee? Is it possible to construct alternative racial, gender, and sexual identities that do not unwittingly reinforce whiteness and heteronormativity? As Celine Parreñas Shimizu asks, "Is the sex act political for the Asian man because he is no longer sexually absent? But what comprises his sexual presence?" (174, emphasis added). [End Page 128] Shimizu's new monograph, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies, argues for a critical attention to negative and undesirable cinematic representations of Asian American masculinity. Rather than dismiss such representations for inhabiting a gender and sexual lack that defines Asian racialization, she contends that more is at stake—namely, these portrayals provide the means to construct an ethical manhood not dependent on control and domination, the very terms of racialized heteronormativity. A politics grounded in what she calls "straitjacket sexuality"—the set of norms that discipline Asian American masculinity as sexless, emasculated, and passive—is insufficient and, more to the point, dangerous. Many of us have been trained to bemoan Long Duk Dong, for instance, for serving as the racial, nonmasculine other to one of the film's main characters, Jake Ryan, "the ideal white male" (117). But while recognizing the historical and cultural contexts for stereotypical characterization is important, it also forecloses an alternative ethical reading Shimizu reveals. While we want to see Long Duk Dong rebel against the racism he faces, he "carves out his own space, derives pleasure, and achieves recognition where there was . . . pain and misrecognition" (121). The point, which might seem counterintuitive, is crucial within the current moment of Asian American studies and its affiliations with feminist and queer theory. Shimizu writes that we need "to advocate a masculinity that criticizes rather than emulates the one that deems [Asian American men] inadequate" (84). Racialized heteronormativity, it appears, is most dangerous not when it is imposed by dominant others but when it is internalized and reproduced within Asian American critical responses. We might not have put the straitjacket on, but we help perpetuate its constricting bondage. We tighten the straps. For Shimizu, films are not merely a case study; indeed, they play a constitutive role in shaping alternative ethical relations that can help "to remap what is valued in our society" (9, emphasis original). Many of the Asian American male characters she examines deliver a care for others that detractors find simply pathetic and emasculating. James Bond's heroic masculinity, for instance, is defined not by compassion but by sexual conquest, standing in sharp contrast to the characters Bruce Lee played that afford the possibility of "empathizing with others who occupy [different] structural positions" (5) precisely because normative masculinity is out of reach. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy on the alterity of the face that renders the self vulnerable, she privileges vulnerability and lack. Shimizu writes about how recognizing our vulnerability can lead us beyond...

In search of meta-landscape architecture: the ethical experience and Jaffa Slope Park's design

The author undertakes an analysis, interpretation and theorization of an ethical experience and its re-presentation in landscape architecture with a close reading of the design process and the built objects of a newly inaugurated Israeli metropolitan park. Jaffa Slope Park in Tel Aviv-Jaffa is situated at an intersection of human and environmental offences that transform it into an ethically charged site. This reading of the park emanates from Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy, dedicated to the ethics of the Other, and especially his thought concerning the re-presentation of an ethical experience. The inevitable paradoxes that are inherent in landscape architecture's conflicting ethical demands are revealed. The author argues that a reflexive utterance in landscape architecture aesthetics—or what she refers to as ‘metalandscape architecture’—is a productive, even necessary, tool for addressing and re-presenting the competing ethics of morally saturated sites.

A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism (review)

A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism (review)

Six Problems in Levinas's Philosophy

Levinas’s constitutive analysis conflicts with his phenomenological descriptions. There are problems in his essential theses: Recognizing alterity is recognizing wants and needs. These are said to be unending, infinite. The wholly Other—God—is constitutive of the alterity of the other human. Ethics originates in Jewish religious history. Ethical absoluteness conflicts with political responsibility.

Approaching the Divine: Levinas on God, Religion, Idolatry, and Atheism

THE LATE BLESSED JOHN PAUL II alluded a few times in his Crossing the Threshold of Hope to Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical insights. He identifies Levinas, together with Paul Ricoeur, as one of the thinkers in contemporary hermeneutics who presents the truth about man and the world from new angles. (1) He believes that Levinas's thought represents a particular school of contemporary personalism and of the philosophy of dialogue in the patterns established by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. (2) It is difficult to talk about certain religious notions today without seriously studying Levinas's ethical philosophy. To pass over his religious conceptions would be to miss his significant contributions to changing the philosophical landscape in general and the texture of ethical and religious studies in particular. Levinas claims that God is glimpsed in the ethical experience. (3) For him ethics provides an opening and a clearing where the trace of God can be discerned. As he remarks, dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face. (4) He believes that God is revealed as a trace the face of the Other to whom the self is called to serve and love. He says that through my relation to the Other, I am in touch with (5) Religion is Levinas's term for this ethical relationship. However, Levinas maintains that there is no direct or immediate relation with the Divine. (6) The Divine can only be accessed the human other to whom the self is infinitely responsible. But this openness to the revelation of God is preconditioned by the self's initial atheism. That the self is first atheistic before God can be glimpsed in the face of the other. Levinas is critical of the notion of religion as the because this casts believers into a spell of some irresistible and magical power. This notion of religion diverts the adherent's attention away from his responsibility for the other and undermines God's holiness and transcendence. Levinas also considers religion that promotes the sacred to be a form of idolatry because in it God is replaced with a sacred object. Moreover, he rejects rational theology because it thematizes God and reduces him to a mere concept. For Levinas rational theology is a manifestation of the philosophy of the Same which, he claims, dissolves transcendence into immanence. In this type of theology, God becomes a mere idea and this leads to a kind of conceptual idolatry. Levinas also disapproves of mystical theology because this will lead to a union between God and man that obscures their independence. Rational and mystical theology weaken, if not destroy, God's transcendence and these two approaches presuppose that God can be accessed other than one's ethical responsibility for the Other. This article will highlight the importance of Levinas's thought within the current postmodern discussion on God and religion. It will begin with a brief discussion of what Heidegger calls in order to understand what it is Levinas takes issue with. Nietzsche's proclamation of the demise of God will also be taken into consideration as a way of situating and deepening Heidegger's ontotheology. In addition, relevant insights in Kant and Hegel's thoughts will be surveyed in order to shed more light on the meaning of ontotheology and the death of God. The remaining sections of the paper will explore the meaning of transcendence, God, atheism, and idolatry within the matrix of Levinas's philosophy. Ontotheology and The Death of God Levinas concurs with Heidegger in criticizing traditional Western metaphysics. But unlike Heidegger, his motivation is not to renew the question of Being. Instead, he wants to reorient Western philosophy's preoccupation with immanence in order to reveal and acknowledge transcendence. Heidegger characterizes Western metaphysics as ontotheology. (7) He calls for a rethinking of this metaphysics because it has obscured the real meaning of Being by identifying it with a particular being. …

The Complexities of Experience: a Critical Tourism Response

In this article, travel is considered as offering moments of encounter with difference that generate new ideas and therefore new perceptions of being in the world for the individual. The role of the Other — of difference and the unknown — is important in the examination of the travel experience of encounter and Levinas's philosophy of the face-to-face encounter with the Other provides a conceptual framework for understanding the responsive relation to difference. This article also addresses the difficulty of writing about the experience in travel. It takes a critical approach through a flexible and interpretative method that attempts to represent the ephemeral nature of the travel experience in a manner that brings the traveller's interactive response to place and encounter to be part of the research. Three ‘voices’ — theory, critical-creative and narrative — reveal aspects of the relationship of the individual and difference for both traveller and researcher, and together offer a three-dimensional tool for tourism studies. This article aims to contribute to understanding the travel experience and, in the experimentation with mixed methodologies, to contribute to our theoretical frameworks through encouraging the reader to take a different journey of exploration.

The Kabbalistic Heart of Levinas

The question Levinas called ‘useless suffering’ and the sense of universal responsibility he advocated go together ethically and need to be understood in terms of one another. These two terms of Levinas's philosophy show him not to be an ethical philosopher – a commonly held appropriation – but a cosmological philosopher, like a Kabbalist of the school of Vilna. Like such a Kabbalist, what Levinas called ‘a faith without theodicy’ goes along with his ‘new modality in the faith of today’. This new modality is characterised by responsibility, on the grounds that we all share one life that is infinite. Monotheism is not a theism (theology) or a panentheism (Spinoza) but a humanism. But it is a ‘messianic’ humanism of responsibility for the other, for the meaning of history, and most of all, the meaning of reason in which the Law of the world to come is inscribed.

Aesthetic approach to character education for young children based on Levinas's philosophy of the other

Aesthetic approach to character education for young children based on Levinas's philosophy of the other

The Ethics of Spanish Identity and In-difference

The Madrid bombing of 2004 and increased immigration have intensified the centuries-old repulsion of the Islamic other in Spain. This social shift is represented in Spanish narrative as a preoccupation with liminal identity—identity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neither. This essay examines Levinas's ethical philosophy of subjectivity in dialogue with Cristina Fernández Cubas's Parientes pobres del diablo (2006). In her texts, the confrontation between doubling and "in-difference," or the difference within, renders indifference impossible, for the double ensures the subject's ethical responsibility for himself and also for the other.

Response

My reading of Levinas's magnificent philosophical works,Totality and InfinityandOtherwise than Beingis based on two primary convictions. The first is that Levinas'sphilosophical works, in which he addresses and enjoins people without regard for identity (without regard for peoplehood and law), were produced out of strong readings of the Judaic tradition. Samuel Moyn showed how deeply Levinas was nurtured by interwar Protestant philosophical theology, and I sought to show that it was also possible to read Levinas's philosophy through the rabbinic tradition. Whereas Moyn's outstanding work shrugged off Levinas's Judaism as an “invention,” I regard Levinas as a midrashic philosopher whose account of ethics amounts to a non-Jewish Judaism—non-Jewish since it is addressed to anyone, yet Judaism since, in my view, it is midrashically determined from the ground up. Most of the book attempts to show how Levinas's philosophy works as a reading of core concepts from the Judaic tradition and thereby as a phenomenological midrash of biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts, all of which Levinas knew well.

THE TORAH OF LEVINASIAN TIME

The topic of time is central to Levinas's philosophy. By examining aspects of the Biblical stories of Abraham and Moses compared with Greek myths, mainly that of Cronos devouring his children, this paper aims to show that Levinas's view of time, though certainly indebted to the Greek (i.e. philosophical) tradition, contains traces of Biblical experiences. Moreover, Levinas's interpretation of time will serve as a concrete demonstration of the way the Jewish experience enables Levinas to express his criticism of the philosophical-Greek tradition.

A covenant of creatures: Levinas's philosophy of Judaism

I am not a particularly Jewish thinker, said Emmanuel Levinas, I am just a thinker. This book argues against the idea, affirmed by Levinas himself, that Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being separate philosophy from Judaism. By reading Levinas's philosophical works through the prism of Judaic texts and ideas, Michael Fagenblat argues that what Levinas called ethics is as much a hermeneutical product wrought from the Judaic heritage as a series of phenomenological observations. Decoding the Levinas's philosophy of Judaism within a Heideggerian and Pauline framework, Fagenblat uses biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts to provide sustained interpretations of the philosopher's work. Ultimately he calls for a reconsideration of the relation between tradition and philosophy, and of the meaning of faith after the death of epistemology.

On the Trace of Emmanuel Levinas

In her remarkable book Emmanuel Levinas: Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, Edith Wyschogrod clearly stressed contribution of Levinas to philosophy, defining it as a in relationships between ethics and metaphysics. She writes, The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is no less than an attempt to accomplish a radical reversal of traditional procedures by grounding metaphysics in ethics rather than in constructing an ethic upon pre-established metaphysical ' Wyschogrod's purpose, as she stated it herself, was mainly to evaluate feasibility of Levinas's effort to reconstruct metaphysics on ethical foundations. As we know, these ethical foundations can be summed up as altruism, a altruism as Wyschogrod said so well, that is grounded on transcendence of human face.2 Wyschogrod, through impressive and rigorous analyses, successively encounters problem of phenomenological method, break with Husserl, self, temporality, language, and Judaism in order to reach some enlightening conclusions that do not avoid problems and objections that could be raised about an ethical foundation of metaphysics. I will come back to some of these important objections later, but before examining these objections, I would like to begin by outlining my own approach to Levinas's philosophy. We can situate enterprise of Levinas in relation to larger movement that preceded him: namely, rebellion of singular and individual against claims of universal. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Bergson all have their place in movement. Each of these thinkers, in his own way, presents a recrimination against powers, both philosophical and practical, that are exercised by a despotic universality, a universality that institutionalizes itself in form of conceptual language, social devices, and laws of State. In a sense, whole of philosophy, especially since Aristotle, is put on trial by these thinkers. Aristotle wanted to make universal only path of science, and he insisted on common measure as means of social exchange and of law. In larger scheme, humans would live under reign of theoretical and practical universale that govern sociality, especially in form of concepts conveyed by language, and more generally in form of abstract - and alienating - laws, which reduce all things to anonymity and impersonality, erasing their singularity and leveling their differences into same neutralizing homogeneity. For some of these thinkers, Nietzsche for example, it is clearly specter of equality, democratic nightmare of a unified and uniform world where everyone is worthy of everyone, which disturbs. Nietzsche opposes to risk of the herd morality creation by individual of his own values and affirmation of individual perspective beyond all common measure and beyond all transcendent or established values. For others, like Henri Bergson, it is primarily limitations of science and philosophy when submitted to straitjacket of language, to common measure of pre-established concepts, which is targeted. For Bergson, general notions stored in language through process of socialization of truth do not permit one to grasp what is incomparable or incommensurable in individual intuition? It is necessary to free oneself from words, to go beyond constraints of language, in order to grasp things by an immediate intuition. For Bergson, intuition is this sympathy by which one carries oneself in interior of an object in order to coincide with what it has as unique and, by consequence, inexpressible.4 It is direct intuition, without any point of view or symbols, that enables us to reach absolute, and it is here, according to Bergson, path which must be chosen by philosopher. However, approach leaves untouched question of communicating to others direct intuition as experienced. …

Audience of the Other

THE LITERARY ARTS AND ETHICS IN LEVINAS Can art jolt you out of ordinary? Can it interrupt your quotidian ways, ways of thinking and being, ways of relating to yourself and others? Once in a while, does some piece of art suddenly catch you off guard, and leave you radically different, unable to approach world as you had before? I suspect that answer to these questions is yes. Then a new set of questions arises: could those moments capture encounter with radically Other in Levinas's philosophy? Can Levinas help to explain experience of art - both moment of experiencing a work, and beyond to creativity which founds artwork? If so, can art be ethical in Levinas's sense? Levinas asserts that ethics is closely tied to language, or even, that ethics is discourse. This points especially to artistic works whose medium is written word over purely visual or musical arts, for example, but it is by no means a stretch to describe artistic experience as one of discourse. Some art - theatre, novels, film-even depicts conversation. And while Levinas clearly proposes that living, active discourse, exhibits this possibility of ethics, if not exclusively, at least more than the said, which might include written artwork, artworks at very least depict instances of saying, thereby complicating a strict distinction between and in their case.1 This saying carries weight and indeterminacy of ethical. In contrast said is in some sense fact, language that has been thematized and immobilized and so constitutes a betrayal of living, pre- formulated ethical relation. The superficiality of with regard to infinite responsibility involved in leads Levinas to describe this mode of language as game-like, a type of play. Though irreducibly separate, two are intimately woven- giving rise to which in turn subordinates original or pre-original gravity of saying.2 Levinas's own language, too, takes a turn in his later work towards what can be called a style. He strays from traditional philosophical terminology and argumentation, adopting language that evokes more than refers, that spurns its literal dictionary reference, and whose formulation into sentences or even fragments is often more beautiful than informative. The poetic face of his writing suggests a deeper affinity with literary art. Levinas's readers might struggle to pin down a concrete understanding of relation to Other. Since this relation is so radical there is no easy way to explain it and no ready examples upon which to draw. His descriptions verge on paradoxical: face remains something that is not seen, widow and orphan are somehow transcendent, Other is infinite but destitute. The world we live in and way that we ordinarily relate to one another are hardly Levinasian; and yet Levinas does not want to issue normative ordinances telling us what we should do. He remains committed to his belief that - even if it does not seem to be so in slightest - ethics is, and not merely should be, fundamental. He thus insists on writing in mode of description, also drawing on his background in phenomenology and its commitment to description, even though I do not think that we can take him to be describing our usual ways of dealing with one another. In his Preface to Totality and Infinity he writes of philosophers: they found morality on after establishing that their politics starts with assumption of war.3 Yet our world often reflects this view, so that we live in a kind of war with one another, for instance, how deeply competition characterizes our interactions with one another. To not fully listen to one's partner, to end a telephone conversation for sake of convenience or economy, to ask someone else to get you a glass of water: no other ethicist would condemn these as strongly as Levinas, and yet these characterize our daily existence more than encounters with radically Other. …

Reading Camus “With,” or After, Levinas

Jacques Derrida has remarked that what occurred in Emmanuel Levinas's post-war philosophy : a discreet but irreversible mutation, one of those powerful, singular, and rare provocations in (Derrida 1996, 9). It certainly holds, if we accept the premise of Levinas' postwar philosophy, that then the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition is to be called to account before something that would at once precede and exceed its terms. In a way that challenges the age-old distinction between theory and praxis, asserts that philosophy answers to a more fundamental ethical exigency which all humans undergo, practically, all the time. This is the exigency, simple yet finally incomprehensible, of being faced by another (or precisely Other) person. It would be a difficult task, and one that is not mine here, to condense in a few words Levinas's accounts of this primal ethical encounter. The focus of this essay is on a path less well travelled in philosophic circles: Albert Camus's post-war ethical and political philosophy. Needed here is only a stress on how Levinas's ethics is an ethics of radical responsibility. As readers will know, Levinas's pivotal contention is that, in encountering the Other, a certain (non)relation is lived through by the subject, radically outside his/her conscious control. The Other is, if we can still say this, a uniqueness who signifies to us at that moment otherwise than through her/his relation to any informing semantic or historical totality (e.g., Entre Nous, 194-45; Totality and Infinity, III B). Rather, the Other's alterity manifests itself to the subject in this encounter as a lasting ethical call to answer for itself and to justify its place in the sun. For Levinas, indeed, we always - as speaking subjects - have responded to the Other. And this ineradicable responsibility, maintains, is the transcendental origin of language, and thus underlies (as it undermines) our capacity to give meaning to our Being. This is the discreet but powerful mutation in the history of ideas that Derrida sees first essayed in Levinas. This essay presents three contentions. First, through bringing the later ethico-political philosophy of Albert in The Rebel into an engagement with the more widely known ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I will contest the lasting silence concerning Camus's political philosophy in philosophical literature.1 Secondly, I argue that Camus's account of political subjectivity in L'Homme Revolte decisively anticipates that later expounded by Levinas. What unites with on the nature of subjectivity, I will maintain - and this is the essay's third contention - is that Camus, before Levinas, ties subjectivity to a primordial responsibility before and for other subjects. To be a subject for Camus, as for Levinas, I contend, is - before it is anything else - to have been called to take a stance vis-a-vis the others in whose time one lives.2 These contentions are carried out in the essay's three parts. Part I presents an exposition of Camus's ethical position in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. This exegesis of Camus with Levinas presents Camus's argument as an alternative attempt, before Levinas's, to conceptualize an ethics refractory to all totalizing philosophical systems. Part II then considers Camus's ethics after Levinas, as it were. There are resources in Camus's texts which, I contend, importantly at once resist and anticipate the kind of criticisms that offers of the occidental philosophical heritage, and which we can feasibly imagine he might accordingly have leveled at Camus's mature - avowedly Graecophile - position. The horizon of the essay, which is explicated in the Conclusion, is that Camus's theoretical voice is a potentially timely one in today's theoretical scene. What he offers, we will see, is a very rare thing: namely, a post-metaphysical ethical contention that is at once post-Nietzschean, yet avowedly universalist. …

WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS: THE DISCORDANCE OF TIME IN LEVINAS AND BERGSON

abstractOne of the earliest examples of articulating the “discordance of time”—a theme that serves as a guiding thread woven throughout much of the re‐engagement with time that is characteristic of continental philosophy—can be found in a series of essays written by Levinas in the aftermath of World War II. I show how these essays derive from a set of key texts by Bergson and how Bergson already anticipated the distinctive ways of conceptualizing the movement of time that are advanced by Levinas in his early essays. Nevertheless, as I will show, Levinas chooses not to acknowledge this Bergsonian anticipation of his theory of time, despite his recognition, repeated throughout many texts and interviews, of the influence of Bergson on the formation of his own thought. I conclude by reflecting on the complexity of the Bergsonian inheritance in Levinas's philosophy of time.

ON THE VERY IDEA OF AN ONTOLOGY OF COMMUNION: BEING, RELATION AND FREEDOM IN ZIZIOULAS AND LEVINAS

The present article examines the theology of John Zizioulas with a view to understanding its coherence and viability for ecclesiology. Instead of treating his trinitarian theology, or his historical claims, I focus upon the basic themes of his personalistic ontology, especially the relationship between the ‘hypostasis’ and its ‘nature.’ I argue that Zizioulas's central concept of freedom rests upon an equivocation: he affirms both that freedom and being are identical, and that they are mutually exclusive. In conversation with the philosophy of Levinas, I further argue that Zizioulas's proposal, as an ontology of communion, falls prey to the same reduction of being to thought that forms the central tenet of Western conceptions of subjectivity. In conclusion, I argue that both of these problems trade on a basic inability to account for grace as the fundamental reality of communion. Throughout my basic concern is to inquire into just what function the category of ‘being’ has in Zizioulas's theology, and to point out its surprising obscurity.

Art and Impowerment: Levinas, Nietzsche, and the Ethics of Literary Discourse

This article draws on the profound affinities between the thought of Levinas and Nietzsche to argue that aesthetics plays a major role in Levinas's ethical philosophy. As in the case of Nietzsche, who called himself “the first tragic philosopher,” aesthetics gives reference to the tragic, yet affirmative content of Levinas's ethics. For both, what Levinas calls the “alterity,” or otherness, of art and literature is located not in an ontological or conceptual “beyond”—in a “spiritual” dimension “which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute”—but in the “interstices” of language, in the “between times” (entretemps) of its modes of temporality: which can only be accessed by way of “the tragic” in art. Alterity signifies not a privileged, interpersonal dimension freed from the problematics of modernity, but points to the complicity between the West's concept of rationality and its history of barbarism exemplified by the Holocaust. The artwork for Levinas is at once temporally diachronic and spatially diasporic, a region of impowerment that is precisely lacking in the expressive or imaginative empowerment normally attributed to the artwork, but which demonstrates a utopian, emancipatory potential in revealing the fissures and hidden pathways that run through the hegemonic structures and totalizing frameworks of modernity.