Levinas's Philosophy Research Articles

Figurative Language and the "Face" in Levinas's Philosophy

For many readers, and perhaps above all for Levinas himself, there is something deeply dissatisfying about the account of the of the in Totality and Infinity and yet the importance of this figure for the major ethical claims of the book can hardly be overstated. fundamental thesis broached through the notion of the face is the difference between the way in which things are given to consciousness (the order of ontology) and the way in which human beings are encountered (the order of ethics). Whereas things are given to consciousness in sensible experience through the mediation of forms or concepts, the face is present, according to Levinas, in its refusal to be contained in a form (Levinas 1969, 194). A passage early in Totality and Infinity defines the face as follows: The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me (50-51, italics in original). A face is thus a very peculiar sort of phenomenon. In effect, it is non-phenomenal; it does not appear as such and remains exterior to concepts.1 Rhetorically, the face is an image that represents the inadequacy of every image for representing alterity. That is, it represents the impossibility of its own representation and so the problems begin.

Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey

What would a Levinasian autobiography look like? Is such a thing imaginable? The question is directed in the first instance at autobiography, as a question concerning its ability to go beyond the representation of the subject to write the encounter with the absolutely other for which Levinas's ethical philosophy calls. But it is also, in the second instance, a question for Levinas, concerning the potential of autobiography to represent an alterity perhaps not fully accounted for by his philosophy. This double question presides over the reflection that follows. Certainly, the notion of Levinasian self-writing is, at first blush, unpromising. In the accepted notion of autobiography, the aim of the genre is the disclosure of the I's self-sameness through the representation of its experience. Experience can only be thought as my experience; as De Quincey says in the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, "No man surely, on a question of my own private experience, could have pretended to be better informed than myself." We assume that autobiographical knowledge comes through the consciousness of an individual subject standing apart: "[E]ach man's consciousness [is shut up] into a silent world of its own, separate and inaccessible to all other consciousness."1 But Levinas's ethics, as he explains in Humanisme de l'autre homme, contains a critique of experience, representation, and the isolated individual: It is rather a matter of the questioning of EXPERIENCE as the source of meaning, of the limit to transcendental apperception, of the end of synchrony and its reversible terms; it is a matter of the non-priority of the Same and, throughout all these limitations, of the end of actuality, as if the untimely (l'intempestif) were come to upset the agreements of representation.2 To quest after meaning in representation misses the point for Levinas. Thought is not equivalent to a knowledge derived from experience, and the subject's aspiration to knowledge of objects [End Page 867] always neglects something more fundamental—the question of the other as source of a meaning that is not reducible to my representation. As for the self, self-identity (le Même) and self-presence (l'actualité) stand indicted. In short, if we accept that autobiography is indeed limited to the representation of the egocentric subject's experience with a view to securing self-sameness, it would seem quite impossible to conceive of it along Levinasian lines. Perhaps, however, Levinas's concern with the other might link his thought to another aspect of autobiography, namely, its performative dimension. Without an address to the other—be it Augustine's prayers to God, Lazarillo's ironically obsequious "Vuestra Merced," Rousseau's over-the-shoulder references to "le lecteur," or Jane Eyre's abrupt interpolations to "Reader"—there could be no autobiography. As Georges Gusdorf already understood, the autobiographer does not write a treatise on experience, but rather its apology.3 In saying experience, the I attests, excuses, premises, promises, confesses, testifies or otherwise translates the discourse of knowledge into that of power and justice. And Levinas's insistence on the "pure sign made to the other; sign made from the giving of the sign," his concern with a language that is not one of message ("an incessant unsaying of the said") but of address "from the revelation of the Other," places him squarely in the domain of the performative.4 A consideration of the performative might allow Levinas and autobiography to be linked. Besides, as Levinas knows very well, there is no escaping the subject, even if that subject has to be conceived as in crisis, a subject whose unstable horizon is given and threatened by the other. In its address to the other, the subject constitutes itself as an ethical being, while violently usurping the former's place in the world by the same speech act. At least one reading of the performative in Levinas makes it a privileged form of the face-to-face with the...

Primal seduction, matricial space and asymmetry in the psychoanalytic encounter.

Wishing to highlight the asymmetric dimension that characterizes ethics as 'responsibility toward the other' in Levinas's philosophy, the author presents as an introduction three related concepts of Levinas's thinking: the caress, the face, the saying. Following some poetic narrative reflections offered as 'interlude' moments, the author seeks to bring together her concept of 'matricial space' inspired by Levinas's conception of ethics and the Laplanchian concept of 'primal seduction', both based on asymmetry. She suggests adding to Laplanche's proposition of two kinds of transference (filled-in transference and hollowed-out transference) a third kind: the matricial-space transference. She argues that together with the hollowed-out transference, which is related to the primal seduction, the matricial-space transference, which relates to the matricial position in the parent/analyst, is provoked by the analyst. If the hollowed-out transference assures the moving-on of the analysis, the matricial-space transference, in combination with the hollowed-out transference, is prerequisite for transformation to occur and may be deciphered specifically in 'impasse' situations, at what she coined 'subjectal moments'. As a conclusion, while insisting on the need for asymmetry in the analytic encounter, she suggests the existence in the human neonate of a need for ethics, and she questions the origin of the human capacity to be responsible toward the other. She illustrates her argument using clinical material from her own work alongside that of other authors.

Primal seduction, matricial space and asymmetry in the psychoanalytic encounter

Wishing to highlight the asymmetric dimension that characterizes ethics as ‘responsibility toward the other’ in Levinas's philosophy, the author presents as an introduction three related concepts of Levinas's thinking: the caress, the face, the saying. Following some poetic narrative reflections offered as ‘interlude’ moments, the author seeks to bring together her concept of ‘matricial space’ inspired by Levinas's conception of ethics and the Laplanchian concept of ‘primal seduction’, both based on asymmetry. She suggests adding to Laplanche's proposition of two kinds of transference (filled‐in transference and hollowed‐out transference) a third kind: the matricial‐space transference. She argues that together with the hollowed‐out transference, which is related to the primal seduction, the matricial‐space transference, which relates to the matricial position in the parent/analyst, is provoked by the analyst. If the hollowed‐out transference assures the moving‐on of the analysis, the matricial‐space transference, in combination with the hollowed‐out transference, is prerequisite for transformation to occur and may be deciphered specifically in ‘impasse’ situations, at what she coined ‘subjectal moments’. As a conclusion, while insisting on the need for asymmetry in the analytic encounter, she suggests the existence in the human neonate of a need for ethics, and she questions the origin of the human capacity to be responsible toward the other. She illustrates her argument using clinical material from her own work alongside that of other authors.

Idolatry and Future Generations: the Persistence of Molech

AbstractDrawing on the work of Jewish text scholars and the philosophy of Levinas and Rosenzweig, this article uses the biblical texts on Molech, and issues in their interpretation, as the starting‐point for an analysis of the intergenerational structure of idolatry. In the context of attention to this structure, and to the particular implications of this for Christians as “Gentiles”, the death of Jesus can be read in ways that subvert the patterns of the Molech cult.

The dialogical prioritization of calls: Toward a communicative model of justice

While the philosophy of ethics of Emmanuel Levinas has had a profound impact on contemporary moral theory, there remains the formidable practical task of transforming his interpersonal account of ethics into a viable and productive model of justice with which to guide political decision making. This essay undertakes a preliminary investigation of this task. Consistent with Levinas, this essay claims that justice must begin with the acknowledgment of the Other and recognizes the important role that communication can play in the unmasking of the Other's face. But in the move to the social, multi‐personal relation, communication is needed not only to recover or unmask the face of the Other, but also to dialogically prioritize multiple ethical summonses. This essay argues, therefore, that Levinas's philosophy of ethics recommends a constraint on justice in which the competing calls of multiple Others are prioritized not by invoking an external hierarchy of principles, but through dialogue. This prioritization of calls can be achieved in dialogue precisely through the capacity of the Other's call to unsettle the self, which is manifested conversationally as the experience of having no rebuttal to the Other's call.

Thinking Through Singularity and Universality in Levinas

We are accustomed to read Levinas's philosophy as an ethical critique of phenomenology or ontology, but his work is relatively infrequently discussed in relation to the canon of moral philosophy. This is no doubt largely due to the fact that important elements of the theoretical systems that undergird these moral philosophies fall within the scope of Levinas's critique of the tradition; thus, we are confident that his view of ethics differs from the standard accounts. However, it can be very instructive to contrast Levinas's view of ethics with the more well-known alternatives in order to determine not whether his view differs, but how. Assessing this difference is crucial if we are to understand what is at stake philosophically in this critique, not only in terms of what might be gained by means of it, but also in terms of what it may put at risk. Moral philosophy has long emphasized that ethics should be principled, and that those principles should be both rational and universal. These qualities are valued because their absence, it is feared, leads to moral relativism. Levinas's philosophy challenges this received view of ethics, yet his work also suggests opposition to relativism in that it continually emphasizes an ethical responsibility that for all intents and purposes seems to be absolute. How does Levinas propose to generate an obligation of sufficient strength to combat relativism without appealing to universal principles? And is he successful? The magnitude of this question prohibits its being directly addressed here. Instead I will discuss one aspect of Levinas's thought that has bearing on this question, namely, the critical dynamic between singularity and universality that appears as a fairly constant theme in his work. The received view is that Levinas opposes universality on the grounds that it is in the very nature of universals to comprehend particulars by assimilating them under a common concept or principle, and this comprehension strips the particular of its singularity. This concern is expressed repeatedly in Totality and Infinity in terms of a "reduction of the other to the same" through which the singularity of the Other-indeed the very alterity of the Other-goes unrecognized.1 In Otherwise than Being Levinas shifts his focus from the singularity of the Other to the singularity of the self, stressing that ethical responsibility is not universal, but is instead singular.2 This received view of Levinas's critique of universality is not, however, without its ambiguities. For instance, the following questions come to mind: is not the value of the Other's singularity expressed here as a universal, and is not the responsibility to respond to that singularity also expressed as a universal? What resources exist within Levinas's philosophy to authorize such universal expressions? This issue has been taken up in two ways in the literature. First, there are those critics who argue that, at least in Totality and Infinity, Levinas makes use of the language of ontology, and it seems implicit in this critique that this language implies a universality that Levinas is trying to overcome.3 second, others have asked in relation to Otherwise than Being what justifies Levinas's generalization of the singularity of the experience of ethical responsibility. That is, what authorizes him to make the move from realizing that he has such a responsibility to claiming that others have such a responsibility.4 My question differs from these because I am not asking about universality as a necessary and perhaps unavoidable function of indicative language, nor am I asking about universality in the sense of making generalizations from oneself to others. Instead I am interested in a type of universality that appears in the moment of ethical responsibility itself. We must begin by clarifying what is meant by "universal," and I will focus on the aspects of necessity and generality. To demonstrate that these two aspects are typically what we have in mind when we talk about universality, consider the examples of universal principles and universal concepts. …

Citizens of Paradise: Dickinson and Emmanuel Levinas's Phenomenology of the Home

There is a similarity between ED's poetry and Levinas's philosophy in that both depend on experience and reject the principle of unity - the main tenet of romantic thought. The paper discusses interiority, which is a key aspect of ED's work. The I discovers itself in enjoyment of the elemental and realizes its selfhood by withdrawal in the home, which is a realm of absolute, happy independence, provides shelter, and mediates between the I and nature. The home is conceived in different ways in ED's poems but always remains a primary frame of reference.

Laurence Sterne and the Ethics of Sexual Difference: Chiasmic Narration and Double Desire

Ethics has gained new resonance in literary studies during past dozen years, announces Laurence Buell in his introductory essay to January 1999 special issue of PMLA on Ethics and Literary Study. As he goes on in following pages to map distinctive contours of this still imprecisely defined movement, Buell is increasingly convincing that groundswell of valenced critical may be building to paradigm-defining concept that textuality was for 1970s and historicism for (7). There is a problem, though, and Buell acknowledges as much. That problem is politics: Perhaps touchiest single issue for both exemplars and critics of ethical turn is issue of whether it boils down, whatever nominal agenda, to a privatization of human relations that makes social and political secondary. (14) The vexed relationship between political (social imperatives) and ethical (privatized relations) is one that also characterizes sentimental literature of eighteenth century. Since 1980s in particular, with growth of politicized criticism informed by Marxist and feminist theory, sentimental literature has been read as a site of conflict that both exposes social problems resulting from economic and cultural iniquities and avoids articulating demand for large-scale reform through what could be called rhetorical fallacy of (individual) feeling heart. (1) Laurence Sterne poses a special problem in terms of political/ethical divide. While it is true that Sterne's scenes of sentiment feature power relations that place his male protagonists (Tristram, Yorick, Toby, and Trim) in sympathetic alliance with bird, ass, dwarf, slave, injured soldier, and fly, most such scenes involve a moment of sympathetic exchange between male character and a young woman (usually a stranger). And, while sensual contact stimulates all moments of sentimental connection in Sterne's work, they do so to more ethically problematic effect when Beguine foments Trim's knee or when Yorick counts beats of grisset's pulse than they do when Toby releases a fly or when Yorick responds to cry of a caged starling. Acute sensitivity between men and women in Sterne's fiction seems driven, by Sterne's own design, as much by prurience as by innocence. Sterne's sentimental signature is ambiguity; however, political readings of these scenes of psychosexual attraction, readings that emphasize presence of male sexual aggression, tend to find ambiguity less real than imagined, less persuasive than convenient. In this essay I wish to reintroduce, as it were, an awareness of earnest longing that imbues such scenes, not to deny their prurience but to recognize that their power derives as much from ethical sincerity as from political skepticism. Levinas and Female Other There is mounting evidence, Buell suggests, that Emmanuel Levinas is the most central theorist for postpoststructuralist dispensation of turn-of-the-century literary-ethical inquiry (9). Levinas's insistence that obligation to other takes precedence over being itself radically alters politicized reading of relation. According to Levinas, other has first claim on self through difference that is never absorbed or dominated or totalized (to use Levinasian vocabulary) by that self. If political self needs other for definition, ethical self, according to Levinas, needs other for transcendence. A recent issue of The Eighteenth Century has demonstrated how work of Levinas opens up ethical dimensions of texts ranging from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko to Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereueses to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; same issue includes articles comparing philosophies of Levinas, Baruch Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant. …

Schleiermacher und Lévinas. Zum Verhältnis von Kulturphilosophie, Religion und Ethik

To see religion in the dimension of the idea of infinity, as a matter of subjectivity and in the divergence of receptivity and spontaneity, can be regarded as major points of comparability between the philosophies of Levinas and Schleiermacher. However, the difference between both thinkers must not be harmonized. To accentuate this difference the essay goes back to the relation of ontology and metaphysics in their interpretation of Plato. This way Levinas can be seen as an unconventional metaphysician, whose fundamental ethics of responsibility is able to describe the backside of Schleiermacher's cultural philosophy, which can be regarded as an ontologically based ethics. In this frame the article develops the thesis that Schleiermachers theory of religion interprets Levinas but also Levinas' thinking of the other« differentiates Schleiermacher's notion of religion.

Ethics and cybernetics: Levinasian reflections

Is cybernetics good, bad, or indifferentq Sherry Turkle enlists deconstructive theory to celebrate the computer age as the embodiment of ``difference.'' No longer just a theory, one can now live a ``virtual'' life. Within a differential but ontologically detached field of signifiers, one can construct and reconstruct egos and environments from the bottom up and endlessly. Lucas Introna, in contrast, enlists the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to condemn the same computer age for increasing the distance between flesh and blood people. Mediating the face-to-face relation between real people, allowing and encouraging communication at a distance, information technology would alienate individuals from the social immediacy productive of moral obligations and responsibilities. In this paper I argue against both of these positions, and for similar reasons. Turkle's celebration and Introna's condemnation of information technology both depend, so I will argue, on the same mistaken meta-interpretation of it. Like Introna, however, but to achieve a different end, I will enlist Levinas's ethical philosophy to make this case.

Traumatic Response

Between November 1975 and May 1976, Emmanuel Levinas presented a lecture course under the title "La Mort et le Temps."1 Alongside a course on "God and Onto-theology," presented during the same period (indeed on the same days, an hour apart from one another), this lecture course constitutes the last regular course that Levinas taught at the Sorbonne.2 The lectures warrant attention for a number of reasons. Presented in the year after the publication of Otherwise than Being (1974) and fifteen years after Totality and Infinity (1961), they allow us to develop a new perspective on both these works for which Levinas is best known, along with the intervening essays.3 In particular, the lectures provide the first available sustained critique of the Heideggerian notions of temporality and being-toward-death. References to Heidegger's understanding of death and time are scattered widely throughout Levinas's corpus, and there are one or two texts, such as the early essay Time and the Other (1947), and "Diachrony and Representation" (1982), in which Levinas devotes concentrated attention to the interrelated themes of time and death.4 But it was only with the appearance of the 1975-76 lectures that we were given the opportunity to knit together the context for Levinas's frequent, but often abrupt and undeveloped remarks about Heidegger's conceptions of time and death. These apparently gnomic utterances now take on the character of a well-articulated, albeit partisan, critique of Heidegger's celebrated analyses of being-toward-death. In devoting close attention to Heidegger's Being and Time, the lectures represent a crucial contribution to sorting out the politically and ethically difficult, if not impossible, relationship that Levinas's philosophy bears to Heidegger's.5 They are especially illuminating since they not only constitute a rare instance in which Levinas's published work treats Heidegger's philosophy in any detail or at any length, but they also present a unique record of Levinas's mature meditations on Heidegger. Despite its inestimable importance for his entire thought, Heidegger's work tends not to be the focus of Levinas's developed philosophy. We had to rely until recently on the early essays of the 1930s in En decouvrant 1'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger ( 1949), which, arguably, were written before Levinas had begun to develop a philosophy that is recognizably his own.6 The 1975/6 lectures discuss Heidegger more elaborately, and in the context of key figures of the history of philosophy, thus shedding new light on Levinas's earlier declarations about Heidegger. Not only, then, does Levinas provide here the rationale for the distance he found it necessary to take in relation to Heidegger's attempt to establish an originary concept of time, a distance that until this point had only been intimated; he also gives us considerable insight as to how he thinks the philosophies of Bergson, Kant, Hegel, Bloch, and Fink fare in comparison to Heidegger's. While in some respects these figures remain consonant with the tradition Levinas seeks to go beyond, their philosophies also contain aspects that break with Heideggerian ontology. Heidegger has accustomed us, says Levinas, "to seek in the history of philosophy the very history of being; all his work consists of reducing metaphysics to the history of being" (MT: 66). For Levinas, "Reducing every philosophical effort to the error or errance of ontotheology is only one possible reading of the history of philosophy" (MT: 67). Levinas's own reading of the history of philosophy might be described as affirming that "in the history of philosophy, there can be meaning other than finitude" (MT: 68). Thus Levinas retrieves from Bergson the notion of "duration," the ultimate significance of which is understood not in terms of the vital elan of Creative Evolution but in the sense that Bergson gives it in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, as "the fact that man can emit a call to the interiority of the other man" (MT: 63). …

Using Stakeholder-Theory into Case-Method

In order to draw some attention to the subject of business ethics and to achieve the inclusion of business ethics into the official curricula of the sixth form courses in secondary schools in Flanders, the Flemish Network for Business Ethics set up a pilot project. It includes about twelve lessons. The main object is to teach students how to cope with an ethical problem. Therefore an educational map has been edited – titled Ethics ...none of my business? (Siebens, 1998) – in which a procedure to handle an ethical problem is proposed. The procedure rests on the stakeholders-approach (Freeman, 1984). Other theoretical items are: ethical intuition, traditional moral norms and communication, a procedure approach, the limitation of acting, and the metaphysical basis (especially the existentialistic philosophy of Levinas).

The evil of being: the Emmanuel Levinas philosophy of education

L'objectiu d'aquest treball es estudiar el pensament de Emmanuel Levinas des d'el punt de vista de la seva filosofia de l'educacio. L'obra de Levinas es una profunda critica al totalitarisme, i res te d'abstracte o poc realista. Tot el contrari. El seu pensament es una filosofia politica, etica i pedagogica; una filosofia util per comprendre els problemes de l'home contemporani.

From Intentionality to Responsibility: On Levinas's Philosophy of Language

From Intentionality to Responsibility: On Levinas's Philosophy of Language

Reason as one for Another: Moral and Theoretical Argument in the Philosophy of Levinas

Reason as one for Another: Moral and Theoretical Argument in the Philosophy of Levinas

Existence and Existents by Emmanuel Levinas

466 BOOK REVIEWS speech. The first occupant of the In-Between is Eros, a demi-god; but soon the boundaries of the In-Between are extended to include philosophers , then human beings generally, who desire the vicarious immortality of offspring, and finally all procreative animal life. Rather than something rarified and special, the daimonic state comes to designate ordinary activity and the entire panoply of living things. (I do acknowledge, however, that comprehensiveness, from a different perspective, may reflect favorably upon the daimonic and not constitute a depreciation) . As the speech of Socrates progTesses, the daimonic In-Between regains some of its original markings of spiritual excellence; and Eros is singled out as man's guide in the ascent to the Beatific Vision. But it is also stated that the initiation into love-matters is incomplete-other things need to be said which are not being said. And Socrates admits in conclusion that Eros is the best guide that human nature can easily (radios) find. The same point is made in the Phaedrus, where love of beauty is credited with being- the easiest form of recollection and where true rhetoric, itself an expression of love, is thought impossible without the governing assistance of non-erotic, dialectical knowledge. With this example from Plato in mind, I state my reservation concerning Voegelin as follows: Plato seems to regard the erotic experience as one means of ascent, likely the most common means, but not as simply identifiable with philosophy; Voegelin seems to count them as one and the same-which perhaps explains why in reading Voegelin it is difficult to keep fixed the boundary between religious belief and philosophical inquiry. Kenyon College Gambier, Ohio p ATRICK COBY Existence and Existents. By EMMANUEL J.,F,VINAS. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. Pp. 101. Existence and Existents, begun before the war and published in 1947 in France, is a difficult book to evaluate in 1978. Evaluating and understanding it are all the more difficult for English-speaking readers who are hearing of the book for the first time and who may not realize precisely how it fits into the development of Levinas's thought and that of contemporary European philosophy. It is very important to note-and one could have hoped to see this noted in the translator's introductionthat Existence and Existents in no way occupies a decisive nor a definitive position in the larger development of European thought, and that it made BOOK REVIEWS 467 no pretention to occupy such a position. Indeed, in the original preface Levinas had called it a preparatory work, and admitted that due to historical circumstances his study did not and could not take into account the work of Sartre. But not only is this book not a major or influential text in post-war French philosophy, it cannot even be seen as a definitive book in the context of Levinas's own thought, for every analysis presented in it has been integrally rethought by the author in his subsequent publications . For those who regard the history of philosophy atomistically, and for whom a book is a book and a text is a text regardless of the place it occupies in relation to an author's entire work, Existence and Existents can possibly appear to be a work of exceptional perceptiveness and descriptive skill, but for others of us who are concerned with the comprehension and comprehensibility of Levinas's phuosophy, a presentation of this book must not omit some comments about its relation to Totality and Infinity and Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de ['essence. To present Existence and Existents as Levinas's mature thoug·ht is to impoverish Levinas's thought; this book is not on an equal footing with the works that succeed it. We should realize the value of the book and the significance of its being translated in relation to Levinas's philosophy taken as a whole, and thus in terms of the development of this philosophy. In the space that we can permit ourselves at present we will try to throw some light on the relationship between certain themes in Existence and Existents and Levinas's more...