Reading Of Levinas Research Articles

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.

Questioning corporate codes of ethics

This paper argues that corporate Codes of Ethics lose their ability to further moral responsiveness because of the narrow instrumental purposes that inform their adoption and use. It draws on Jacques Derrida's reading of Emmanuel Levinas to argue that, despite the fact that all philosophical language entails a certain violence, corporate Codes of Ethics could potentially play a more meaningful role in furthering ethical questioning within corporations. The paper argues that Derrida's reading of Levinas' notion of ‘the third’ could precipitate the emergence of a broader sense of ethical responsibility towards multiple others within corporations. Codes may also present the opportunity for corporations to engage in the reconsideration of their own purposes in the light of questions of justice towards multiple others. How these changes in the establishment and use of Codes may be accomplished is explored towards the end of the paper.

‘The discipline of the question’: Rereading Derrida's ‘Violence and Metaphysics’

This article recalls Derrida's reading of Levinasian ethics as a discourse of the other, particularly in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in order to re-elaborate Derrida's own account of the other's heterogeneity, notably in light of critiques of deconstruction's thinking of difference, alterity, and the unconditional. At stake here is the precise meaning of what may be termed wholly other; or, better still, the specific nature of the arguments about the question of the other from among Derrida's earlier texts, which must be recalled amidst any appeal to absolute alterity, especially of the kind frequently found in Derrida commentary today. The article suggests that, in the process of Derrida reading Levinas, the radical alterity of the other is sustained in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ principally in terms of the legitimacy (or ‘discipline’) of a question that arises only on the hither side of a phenomenology of the other – a phenomenology that emerges, nonetheless, as its unacknowledged ground. Thus, in contrast to Levinasian thought (and yet also in deeper affinity with what we might term, for Derrida, its still obscured originality), deconstruction's discourse of the other opens onto the wholly other not simply as the ‘beyond’ or the ‘outside’ of phenomenology's limits, but only at the point where the phenomenological gives way in something like a double sense.

Allergologies Versus Homeopathies

This paper is a reconstruction of Levinas’ reading of Hegel and his understanding of violence (of the enemy and the war). Combining Franz Rosenzweig’s reflections which concern the sick philosopher and Hegel’s state, as well as Derrida’s interpretation of the different attributes of violence, our aim is also to give full evidence of Derrida’s critical reading of Levinas. The first part illustrates the various classifications of the figures of violence from the different periods of Hegel’s life and the traces that these figures have left in Levinas’ texts beginning with ‘Liberte et commandement’ in 1953. In the second part we discuss Hegel’s well-known analogy from his Rechtsphilosophie on sovereignty and the organism—that is to say the parallel reading of some paragraphs of Naturphilosophie too—and the relation between totality and violence, in Levinas’ ‘ontology as allergy’ and in Derrida’s autoimmunology.

Facing the Veil in Education: Todd and the “Veiling” Question

So when one expresses concern about seeing, or not seeing, the face of the student or the teacher, when one demands “that the face — not just the eyes — be visible so that one can better ‘read’ it and thereby form ‘proper’ communicative relations,” what is one referring to in the context of Levinas? When reading Levinas, Biblical connotations to “the face” must be kept in mind, as well as references to Franz Rosenzweig’s writings. Very familiar with Rosenzweig’s work, Levinas wrote a “Foreword” for Stephane Moses’s System and Revelation, in which Moses discusses Rosenzweig’s use of “the human face” as “the way the transcendence of the other is revealed to me,” harking back to “the face of God” and “Truth.” Sean Hand recalls that, in Totality and Infinity already, “[t]he term ‘face’...denotes the way in which the presentation of the other to me exceeds all idea of the other in me,” and Michael Smith writes: “The face of the other is the locus of transcendence in that it calls into question the I in its existence as a being for itself.”

Alergologias. De Uma Analogia da Soberania aos Atributos da Violência

This paper is a reconstruction of Levinas’ reading of Hegel and his understanding of violence (of the enemy and the war). Combining Franz Rosenzweig’s reflections which concem the sick philosopher and Hegel’s State, as well as Derrida’s interpretation of the different attributes of violence, our aim is also to give full evidence of Derrida’s critical reading of Levinas. The first part illustrates the various classifications of the figures of violence from the different periods of Hegel’s life and the traces that these figures have left in Levinas’ texts beginning with „Liberté et commandement” in 1953. In the second part we discuss Hegel’s well-known analogy from his Rechtsphilosophie on sovereignty and the organism - that is to say the parallel reading of some paragraphs of Naturphilosophie too - and the relation between totality and violence, in Levinas’ “ontology as allergy” and in Derrida’s autoimmunology.

The Primacy of Disruption in Levinas’ Account of Transcendence

AbstractI present ‘disruption’ as what is most fundamental to Levinas’ account of transcendence. I argue that one should read his treatment of the Other as a modulation of transcendence, and prioritize the structures of positionality and solitude as the conditions that make transcendence possible. Hence, Being is transcended insofar as these structures have ‘always already’ articulated the rupturing of the subject, which, for Levinas, constitutes her transcending. Included in my argument is a critique of reading Levinas’ project as undermining the fundamentally solitary nature of human existence because of his focus on alterity. Such a reading reduces Levinas’ account of alterity, instead of maintaining its signification as that which is ‘never there.’ It is the solitary existent who is vulnerable before an ‘already gone by’ alterity, such that her subjectivity is radically disrupted. For Levinas, an encounter with alterity is the agony of finding no one, or having nowhere, from which I can be granted wholeness or justification. It follows that transcendence is fundamentally concretized in a positioned solitude, and not in some inter-subjective space.

Impersonal Speech: Blanchot, Virno, Messianism

This article addresses Virno’s diagnosis of the capture of the ability to speak in post‐Fordist capitalism by bringing his notion of virtuosity into dialogue with Blanchot’s notion of messianism. As the author shows, Virno explores the way in which what he calls virtuosity draws upon what he calls the “background” of speech, which, the author argues, is linked to the idea of the impersonal form “one speaks” in Deleuze and Guattari. Blanchot gives an alternative account of this “background”, focusing on its operation in the interpersonal relation he characterises as messianic. Since Blanchot’s account of the interpersonal relation is developed in his theoretical work chiefly through a reading of Levinas, the author traces Blanchot’s divergence from his friend on the key question of the significance of the Other, which Levinas places at the heart of his reflections on the ethical. The author then shows that this divergence also accounts for the way in which Blanchot reads Levinas’s notions of Judaism, God and the Messiah. Finally, the author shows how a redeveloped notion of virtuosity might give rise to a practice in which the capture of our ability to speak is challenged at the level of our interpersonal relations. The author uses Blanchot’s reflections on the events of May 1968 as an example of the way in which we might “affirm the break” such virtuosity or messianism constitutes.

The Inseparability of Ethics and Politics: Rethinking the Third in Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas is variously used to provide a conceptualization of ethics from which to deduce an ethical politics, an account of the movement from ethics to politics or an exhortation to continually interrupt politics in the name of ethics. What all these approaches share is a reading of Levinas where ethics and politics are separated and ethics is prioritized. My argument in this article is that if the concept of the Third is given due weight in Levinas's work then this separation and prioritization is untenable. The reading advanced foregrounds the Third and in doing so demonstrates that the unproblematized ‘ethics’ often drawn from Levinas is more complex than might initially appear. I argue that if the Third is taken seriously then Levinas's work leads to a requirement to think in terms of the ethico-political, so complicating any attempt to deduce politics from ethics which draws on this.

Judging Emmanuel Levinas? Some Reflections on Reading Levinas, Law, Politics

Marinos Diamantides, in presenting these ten prescient essays many of which have previously been published highlights the pertinence of the wisdom of Emmanuel Levinas to understanding as well as 'doing' law and politics.1 Reading Levinas requires enormous exegetical labours; the dense intertextuality of his cor pus remains forbidding, even for the cognoscenti; and the fusion of the philosophic and messianic does not authorize any cash and carry'practices of reading.'Vulgar Levinasianism is as important to avoid as Vulgar Marxism. C. Fred Alford (Chapter 6) renders the former as the phenomenon of the 'Levinas effect', that is the ability of Levinas' texts to say anything that the reader wants to hear' (107). The work under review exemplifies for the most part the gains of understanding aris ing from resisting the 'Levinas effect'. It also provides a safe harbour for those as yet unfamiliar with Levinas' relation to legal and political theory. It also goes beyond understanding Levinas to the task of judging him, in the distinctive realms of contemporary political and jurisprudential theory. Levinas constitutes an alien presence to both mainstream and subaltern legal theory and practice. Outside a niche of critical jurisprudential scholarship,2 the reception of Levinas in Anglo-American legal theory remains minimal. Even more disappointing is the fact that the field of professional legal ethics is as yet uninformed by Levinas.3 How may we understand this not-so-benign neglect? Is it because Levinas does not directly address the genre of the modern/postmodern

"A Land that Devours Its Inhabitants": Midrashic Reading, Emmanuel Levinas, and Prophetic Exegesis

This essay initially cites the ways Levinas has been read to date—in philosophy, feminism, and Jewish Studies—noting the absence of midrashic reading, and especially one identified as akin to literary reading. It next defines midrash as the Rabbis and Jewish Studies scholars describe it (for example, in Genesis 22), and proceeds to examine a sample of midrashic reading—Levinas's "Promised Land or Permitted Land?"—perusing this text in four ways: (1) for the Biblical scripture (in Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah) the Talmudic rabbis read; (2) for the Talmudic commentary in Sotah that Levinas examines; (3) for Levinas's ethical commentary; and (4) for my own prophetic account of Levinas's commentary upon Talmud's scriptural reading. These four roughly correspond, the essay suggests, with the four traditional levels of interpretation— pshat, remez, d'rash , and sod —about which the Rabbis speak or the four levels about which Christian hermeneuts speak: plain sense, allegorical, moral, and anagogic.

Hup! Hup! We Must Tumble: Toward an Ethical Reading of the Schlemiel

The schlemiel is a central character in the tradition of Yiddish and Jewish-American literature. Oftentimes, the schlemiel is read as a comic character that has political and ethical content. In our essay, we take another look at the ethical character of the schlemiel by way of a close reading of Levinas's notion of the self, aesthetics, and ethics, coupled with Hommi Bhabba's reading of Levinas in terms of history and Adam Newton's reading of Levinas in terms of narrative. This nuanced reading is used in the analysis of schlemiels in selected stories and parables of Franz Kafka, I. B. Singer and Nathan Englander.

The Point of the Story: Levinas, Blanchot and "The Madness of the Day"

The focus of this article is Levinas's "Exercises on 'The Madness of the Day'" in Proper Names and Blanchot's story, which is the subject of Levinas's reading. With reference to some of the writings by each of the authors, the problem of testimony and its limits is posed, in particular in relation to testifying to death or madness. What are Levinas's reading and Blanchot's story about? What differences in perspective can be emphasized? In what sense, in both approaches, is the point of the story elusive?

Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust and the Unjust Death (review)

Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust and the Unjust Death, by Clifton R. Spargo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 311pp. $60.00. R. Clifton Spargo's Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death is perhaps the most erudite reading of Levinas have encountered to date. In this book, Spargo, a professor of English at Marquette University, asks us to reconsider Levinas s ethics precisely in the shadow of the Holocaust. Spargo's interest, however, is not the fact of the Holocaust per se. Rather, he focuses on the effects, the figure of the Holocaust, and in particular, the impact the memory of the Holocaust has on our understanding of ethics and our responsibility to our neighbors. Spargo's talent, in part, lies in his masterful etymological analysis and careful unpacking of Levinas's Christological vocabulary. Additionally, Spargo is able to read Levinas against himself productively. That is, he is able to demonstrate that even where Levinas's philosophy is at odds with itself one can nonetheless find evidence for the ethics of responsibility underlying this apparent inconsistency. Spargo's book is well organized into an introduction, four chapters, and an afterword. The introduction provides a broad but detailed description of the impact of French philosophy on American intellectual circles. It specifically lays the ground for situating Levinas's entry into the American intellectual/ philosophical scene, which coincided with a waning interest in deconstruction and a suspicion of deconstruction's sympathy for Nietzschean cynicism (ethics is fraudulent). Thus, the timing was right for Levinas's ethical project, which promoted a positive conception of responsibility. Chapter 1, Ethics as Unquieted Memory, explores the role of mourning in Levinas's project. Levinas's analysis of mourning, which necessarily focuses on the one who has died, marks the shift from a concern with ourselves to a preoccupation with the other. Chapter 2 explores bad conscience in both Nietzsche and Levinas, demonstrating that although Levinas does not make much mention of Nietzsche, there is nonetheless a substantive critique of Nietzsche that pervades Levinas's discussion of responsibility. Where the first two chapters are largely sympathetic to Levinas, chapters 3 and 4 are largely critical. Yet, it is precisely in this critique that Spargo reveals the power of Levinas's ethics. He explores the role of the memory of injustice in acknowledging our responsibility in present-day injustice and in addressoimg it accordingly-in short, in caring. Spargo's argument exposes an unacknowledged chain of causality that leads to each of us, implicating all of us in our present injustices. Having shown each of us, including Bill Why should care about the Mexicans? O'Reilly, to fit into this chain of responsibility (pp. 220-221), Spargo argues that this ethical responsibility is in fact the precursor to political responsibility and political action. The why should care; didn't do anything response of the many simply has no purchase. Spargo's argument is compelling, and his analysis is unique in that it draws political responsibility closer to Levinas's ethics than has heretofore been done. Nonetheless, this analysis assumes a Levinasian subject that is already willing to admit responsibility and say I am guilty. am not convinced that for some people they should care, even if the should is a logically or philosophically strong should, will translate into they do care. Yet, there is a space in Spargo's analysis in which we might find a path to follow. In a nuanced discussion regarding the possibility of viewing the Holocaust as a sign of international crisis (p. 184), Spargo refers to the manner in which democracies and others refused permission to Jewish refugees of Nazi occupied Europe to enter into their borders (p. …

The exteriority of ethics in management and its transition into justice: a Levinasian approach to ethics in business

Levinas did not present any new ethical theories; he did not even give any normative recommendations. But his phenomenological investigations help us to understand how the idea of ethics emerges and how we try to cope with it. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some implications from a reading of Levinas on how ethical challenges are handled within a management perspective. The paper claims that management, both in theory and in practice, is necessarily egocentric and thus ethically biased. Therefore, ethics, defined as the idea that it is possible to do otherwise than pursue one's own interest, must have its source outside the scope of management. Levinas identifies this source as the call for responsibility from the Other, beyond the reach of managerial control. He also suggests how this idea of ethics is put into practice, especially in economic life: the existence of money makes it both possible and necessary to compare unique and incomparable others. Management tools may be used in the service of always more justice, as it also may be used for the opposite purpose. Instead of trying to draw a normative conclusion from Levinas, we may distinguish between two ways of experiencing reality: one through language and knowledge, covering both descriptive and normative knowledge, including ‘business ethics’, and the other through the particular events of encounters, from where this knowledge is continuously questioned through the call for responsibility, and thereby may provide possibilities for continuous improvements towards always more justice.

Eros and Ethics: Levinas's Reading of Plato's ‘Good Beyond Being’

This paper addresses the notorious logic and semantic difficulties encountered by Lévinas in articulating his ethics of alterity. Tracing the philosophical genesis of this question in Descartes and Heidegger, it recognises Lévinas's claim that there can be no ontological foundation for ethics because ontology would reduce ethics to a form of mathematical ratio. Lévinas is unwilling to deny his phenomenological experience of a desire for goodness and unable to deny his despair at his ontological alienation from the good and so he is driven to seek an irrational link between the human being and a metaphysical ‘good beyond being’. Retrieving an ancient gnostic neo-Platonist working of the same problem from the work of Hans Jonas, the paper reconsiders Lévinas's reading of Plato, specifically his understanding of Socrates’ exposition of erosin the Phaedo, in order to illustrate how his ethics of alterity may allow the human being to refer irrationally to the good beyond being.

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Apologies: Levinas and Dialogue

In his recent article ‘Speech and Sensibility: Levinas and Habermas on the Constitution of the Moral Point of View’, Steven Hendley argues that Levinas’s preoccupation with language as ‘exposure’ to the ‘other’ provides an important corrective to Habermas’s focus on the ‘procedural’ aspects of communication. Specifically, what concerns Hendley is the question of moral motivation, and how Levinas, unlike Habermas, responds to this question by stressing the dialogical relation as one of coming ‘into proximity to the face of the other’ who possesses ‘the authority to command my consideration’. Hendley’s thesis is bold and provocative. However, it relies on too partial a reading of Levinas’s work. In this paper I argue that the sense in which Levinas thinks of ‘justifying oneself’ cannot be adequately understood in terms of an ‘outstretched field of questions and answers’. Rather, Levinas’s primary concern is to show how, prior to dialogue, the ‘I’ is constituted in existential guilt: the violence of simply being‐there.

En découvrant l’existence avec Emmanuel Lévinas

This text offers an analysis of the first French reaction to the thought of Heidegger as undertaken by Levinas. It also seeks to highlight the roots of the uneasy dialogue that Levinas had with a work which he considered to be at one and the same time imprescriptible and answerable for its ambiguities. Indeed, a reading of Levinas' pre-war texts demonstrates how his initial interpretation of the core concepts of Sein und Zeit, stretched to the limits by ambiguities, led him to deny the question of being any access to a genuine transcendence: contrary to its explicit treatment by Heidegger. Being itself, understood in the first instance by Levinas as determinism of being, demands the movement of escape and the assumption of a truly ethical position, the latter in the early stages of his work remaining almost entirely implicit.

Levinas and the Phenomenology of Reading

Although Levinas showed relatively little interest in secular literature, and indeed he was sometimes distinctly hostile towards it, some of his essays sketch a phenomenological account of the reading experience which is applicable to non-sacred texts. This article compares Levinas's phenomenology of reading to that of Wolfgang Iser, and argues that it may be susceptible to some of the same criticisms. It then examines Levinas's 1947 essay L'Autre dans Proust in the light of Proust's Un amour de Swann, suggesting that Levinas's reading is blind to aspects of Proust's writing which contradict his ethics. This finally raises questions about the viability of a genuinely enlightening, ethical encounter between reader and text, or between self and other.