Work Of Levinas Research Articles

Language and Eschatology in the Work of Emmanuel Levinas

This paper discusses the relationship between language and eschatology in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. It will take into consideration the various concepts of eschatology in his work by regarding his philosophical writings as well as his Talmudic interpretations. As I will show, eschatology plays a significant role in the work of Levinas and is strongly linked to the notion of language. In this context, I would like to underline the relationship between the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas regarding language and eschatology, especially in light of the recently published correspondence between Rosenzweig and Margit (Gritli) Rosenstock-Huessy, the so-called "Gritli" letters. Furthermore, this article aims at explaining the importance of the notion of the voice in order to point out a new interpretation of the saying ( le dire ) and the said ( le dit ) in the later work of Levinas.

The meaning of consolation as experienced by nurses in a home‐care setting

The aim of this study was to illuminate nurses' experiences of consolation and how these experiences relate to suffering and care. Consolation is commonly associated with the relief of suffering. The question of consolation in terms of its definition and relevance for care has, however, been a matter of discussion among nurse researchers. The question raised concerns about the nature of consolation, its place and its role in relation to care and the caring sciences. An explorative qualitative interview study with 12 participants, six registered and six enrolled nurses, was carried out in a home-care context. A phenomenological-hermeneutic method inspired by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was used for the text analysis. Results. Two main aspects of consolation appeared: 'the present consolation', which is flexible, sustaining and opening and 'the absent consolation', which conceals the suffering and is incapable of consoling. The result was interpreted from a philosophical-ethical perspective, based on the works of Levinas and Lögstrup. Consolation appears as a complex phenomenon, both in terms of its existence and its absence consolation, constituting a caring and non-caring consolation. A caring consolation entails meeting the other as different and being present in a way that gives the other space to be the one he or she really is. It requires acceptance, accepting the sufferer and his/her way of suffering as unique. Relevance to clinical practice. The clinical nurse is involved in complex care situations, which entails both reflecting upon and using intuition when consoling. A caring consolation is a contradictory phenomenon that requires a nurse to be capable of both reflecting upon and acting intuitively on the unique suffering of the other.

Beyond the Dialectic: Conrad, Levinas, and the Scene of Recognition

"Beyond the Dialectic: Conrad, Levinas, and the Scene of Recognition" reads Conrad's Heart of Darkness through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Focusing on two key scenes—Marlow's meetings with Kurtz and the Intended—the essay uses Levinas's work to highlight Conrad's attempts to move beyond the violence inherent in the Hegelian philosophical tradition, to a position of respect and responsibility for the other.

Divine Anonymities: On Transascendence and Transdescendence in the Works of Levinas, Celan, and Lispector

AbstractThose points at which Emmanuel Levinas's later work touches on the question of God express a profound ambiguity. Here it is often the case that theism becomes indistinguishable from atheism, ethics is shown to be indistinguishable from religion and, to cite two important concepts invented by Levinas, il y a (lit., “there is;” denotes bare, senseless material existence) becomes indistinguishable from illeité (lit., “it-ness;” denotes the absolute distance or anonymity of God). While Levinas insists upon a measure of ambiguity or enigma in all truthful religious discourse, these series of ambiguities are often covered over by Levinas's ethical project as soon as they appear. With the aid of two deeply philosophical writers in whose work we find literary analogues of the ambiguities thematized in Levinas—the poet Paul Celan and the novelist Clarice Lispector—this paper offers a critique of Levinas's thin, often moralistic, concepts of alterity and transcendence. The critique proceeds by showing how Celan and Lispector demonstrate the consequences of thinking the anonymity of God and the corresponding undecidability of the most-high and the most-low (i.e., transascendence and transdescendence) to its logical conclusion. In the process, Celan and Lispector emerge as original religious thinkers in their own right, not merely as counterweights to Levinas.

Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death

Vigilant Memory focuses on the particular role of Emmanuel Levinas's thought in reasserting the ethical parameters for poststructuralist criticism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. More than simply situating Levinas's ethics within the larger context of his philosophy, R. Clifton Spargo offers a new explanation of its significance in relation to history. In critical readings of the limits and also the heretofore untapped possibilities of Levinasian ethics, Spargo explores the impact of the Holocaust on Levinas's various figures of while examining the place of mourning, the bad conscience, the victim, and the stranger/neighbor as they appear in Levinas's work. Ultimately, Spargo ranges beyond Levinas's explicit philosophical or implicit political positions to calculate the necessary function of the memory of injustice in our cultural and political discourses on the characteristics of a just society. In this original and magisterial study, Spargo uses Levinas's work to approach our understanding of the suffering and death of others, and in doing so reintroduces an essential ethical element to the reading of literature, culture, and everyday life.

Aspects of alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the contemporary debate

Every other is truly other, but no other is wholly other.This is the claim that Aspects of Alterity defends. Taking up the question of otherness that so fascinates contemporary continental philosophy, this book asks what it means for something or someone to be other than the self. Levinas and those influenced by him point out that the philosophical tradition of the West has generally favored the self at the expense of the other. Such a self-centered perspective never encounters the other qua other, however. In response, postmodern thought insists on the absolute otherness of the other, epitomized by the deconstructive claim every other is wholly other.But absolute otherness generates problems and aporias of its own. This has led some thinkers to reevaluate the notion of relative otherness in light of the postmodern critique, arguing for a chiastic account that does justice to both the alterity and the similitude of the other. These latter two positions-absolute otherness and a rehabilitated account of relative otherness-are the main contenders in the contemporary debate.The philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Gabriel Marcel provide the point of embarkation for coming to understand the two positions on this question. Levinas and Marcel were contemporaries whose philosophies exhibit remarkably similar concern for the other but nevertheless remain fundamentally incompatible. Thus, these two thinkers provide a striking illustration of both the proximity of and the unbridgeable gap between two accounts of otherness.Aspects of Alterity delves into this debate, first in order understand the issues at stake in these two positions and second to determine which description better accounts for the experience of encountering the other.After a thorough assessment and critique of otherness in Levinas's and Marcel's work, including a discussion of the relationship of ethical alterity to theological assumptions, Aspects of Alterity traces the transmission and development of these two conceptions of otherness. Levinas's version of otherness can be seen in the work of Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo, while Marcel's understanding of otherness influences the work of Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney.Ultimately, Aspects of Alterity makes a case for a hermeneutic account of otherness. Otherness itself is not absolute, but is a chiasm of alterity and similitude. Properly articulated, such an account is capable of addressing the legitimate ethical and epistemological concerns that lead thinkers to construe otherness in absolute terms, but without the absolute aporiasthat accompany such a characterization.

Editorial introduction

This special issue presents the results of a three‐day conference that was held between 27 and 29 October 2005 at the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the University of Leicester. The papers in this issue approach the work of Emmanuel Levinas and respond to him in different ways. Some introduce his work, some apply it in various contexts, some propose to extend it, while others question it. The issue also includes, in English for the first time, a translation of ‘Sociality and Money’, a text by Levinas that directly addresses the prospects for ethics in what he calls a ‘civilisation of money’. It is hoped that this text by Levinas will provide those unfamiliar with his writing something of an introduction to his work, and for readers familiar with Levinas it will provide access to a new text that concerns itself here explicitly with money and economic life. The editorial introduction seeks to provide some context for Levinas's work and its reception in philosophy and business ethics before overviewing the papers in the issue.

Mortal Ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers

Emmanuel Levinas never wrote about cinema. To the uninitiated, this may appear surprising, given that his life spanned the twentieth century, in which film emerged as a major art form, and his work includes tantalising allusions to films and the cinematic medium. Far from surprising, however, the liminal place that cinema occupies in Levinas’s thought is entirely understandable. Although his philosophy features many cultured references to literature and the other arts, and he discusses the work of such writers as Marcel Proust and Michel Leiris in some detail, his early work is dismissive of the aesthetic dimension in ethical terms. More significantly still, his philosophy bears a challenging relation to questions of vision and the phenomenological world of appearance, tending towards the anti-ocular and revealing an iconoclastic approach to images. There is something provocative, then, in wanting to ask what Levinas’s philosophy has to say about cinema, if we understand this realm as the location par excellence of the moving image. Yet this is precisely the guiding question of this Special Issue, which is the first to bring together articles on the work of Levinas and the insights that his philosophy can offer to film studies. The collection features an international selection of contributors, and includes Levinas specialists as well as film scholars. There is no easy bond to be forged between this philosopher and film, and the possibility of making this connection remains open to interrogation throughout some of the articles. But by taking Levinas to the cinema, while tracking the cinematic aspects of his thinking, all of the contributors address this hitherto occluded relation in generative ways, and each creates a critical opening for future research in the field.

Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death

Reviewed by Gregor Schnuer University of Edinburgh Spargo, R. Clifton. Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. 311. R. Clifton Spargo's study of Emmanuel Levinas addresses strong ethical concerns relating to our sense of memory, responsibility and justice. More specifically, Vigilant Memory concerns itself with Levinas's ethics, presenting key concepts in the philosopher's thought and striving to engage in a positive critique of his work. Focusing on the impact of the Holocaust on Levinas the theorist and foregrounding postmodern debates concerning ethics, Vigilant Memory formulates an understanding of what is at stake in the memory of injustice. Spargo demonstrates that for Levinas, the Holocaust serves as both the ultimate memory and the supreme injustice, a stance that leads Spargo to distinguish between the notion of "rights" and "responsibility" and to call for the formulation and practice of what he calls "vigilant memory." In his Introduction, Spargo explains that his study responds to three main critiques of Levinas's notion of the memory of injustice. The first of these critiques, historical and political in scope, ponders the significance of memory, especially memory of the Holocaust, and questions whether memory of victimization is often accorded cultural importance it does not deserve. The second is a mainly political concern regarding the influence of memory on identity formation and the extent to which the emergence of the victim's subjectivity might foster political instability. The third and most cynical critique of Levinas's concept is one that posits a circumstance in which victims become opportunists and use their victim status as a means of attaining sympathy, attention and special political rights (27). Spargo's analysis centers on these three positions, which, taken up in turn, form the basis for his extended critical engagement with Levinas's work. [End Page 144] In his first chapter, titled "Ethics as Unquieted Memory," Spargo offers a reading that underscores how important the concept of memory is in the ethical system Levinas elaborates. Contrary to Heidegger's conception of death as the final, concluding experience of being, Levinas's holds that post-mortem memory of the dead entails responsibilities for the living. Spargo posits that the work of memory goes beyond funerary rites and rituals, and in this first chapter, his engagement with the Holocaust takes shape. The interdisciplinary reach of this study allows for the introduction of a historical perspective, which fluidly evolves out of the initial engagement with memory. The concluding passages of the chapter connect death, memory and the Holocaust to arrive at Levinas's concept of "unjust death." In addition to highlighting the ethical and political importance of the memory of injustice and underscoring its universal significance, Spargo emphasizes Levinas's concern for history, demonstrating its resonance with contemporary theories of historiography formulated, for instance, by Michel de Certeau and Hayden White. Spargo's discussion of historiography strengthens his claims concerning the need for vigilance with respect to questions of memory and the Levinasian challenge to "history proper," allowing for history to be understood not as what is remembered, but as what has been remembered so far. The second chapter, "The Unpleasure of Consciousness," takes up the question of the ethics of mourning in Levinas's concept of bad conscience. Spargo shows the influence that Nietzsche's concept of bad conscience had on Levinas, recognizing, however, that the distance he takes from it allows him to formulate an understanding of bad conscience that bears on questions of memory, history and the moral self. The concept of responsibility is the one component of moral consciousness that Levinas is thought to be revising. Spargo shows how Levinas refutes the notion of responsibility as oppressive obligation and embraces the idea of an obliging duty that results from a rupture between intention and result, desire and reality. This makes the issue of complicity unavoidable and Spargo's discussion of "The Bad Conscience in History" and "The Bad Conscience and the Holocaust" argues for...

Individuation in Levinas and Heidegger

Derrida's Violence and Metaphysics (1964) remains the most sustained encounter between Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger. In it, broadly speaking, Derrida criticises Levinas for attempting to access the other as a positive infinity rather than a negative one, an absolute trauma that leaves no mark on the ego. In opposition to this I shall attempt to show that access to the other always presupposes a One from which it would depart, in a negative gesture of putting in question which occurs when death impinges upon an ego. This understanding of otherness forces Levinas to understand Heidegger's death as owned by the ego and to reverse this ownership by giving death to the Other, in order to prevent death's appropriation and ensure that it remain other. This is Levinas's point of departure: otherness can be produced only on the basis of a prior unity. This means that there can be no otherness in the pre-individual il y a or as a whole: the oneness of the human ego must be replicated here. As a result, Levinas cannot say why individuation occurs since this would require some form of otherness within the il y a. This principle of individuation would need to be other than the field in which individuation occurs in order to be explanatory. The general problem, then, is that Levinas models his understanding of oneness and otherness on the ethical situation of the human One (ego) and the human Other (V Autrui). In other words, for Levinas, the only otherness is death and in the il y a there is no death, since there are no humans, indeed there are no individuated entities at all: there is nothing that could die and thus open up a passage toward otiierness. The notion that death is the only guise which otherness can assume is precisely what Heidegger finds necessary to contest. Heidegger's early meditation on death differs from that of Levinas in a way that Levinas cannot see. Levinas understands Heidegger's death to be proper to the ego and so reverses this ownership, but, in fact, for Heidegger the most basic function of death is closer to Levinas's notion of hypostasis. Death creates singular entities. It does not belong to anyone but first produces an entity which can have such things as belongings. It is this subtle displacement of death and the incompleteness that its always outstanding character imposes that will eventually allow Heidegger to explain in a way that Levinas cannot because he situates death and its otherness after the process of individuation, which is to say subsequent to a complete individuated substance. This failure can be demonstrated by examining the problems which Heidegger found with his early position on death, which necessitated the alterations that produced his later work and which center around the humanism that restricts otherness to human death. These problems, in a slightly different way, haunt the Levinassian position, and it is this difference that prevents Levinas from seeing and overcoming the difficulties that this entails. Since Heidegger is not lumbered with an understanding ofthe human being as a complete ego, he is not compelled to understand beings as a whole as complete. Hence he can later explain individuation on the basis of a certain original incompleteness of beings as a whole. We can formalize this reading of Heidegger by way of Zizek's juxtaposition of Lacan and Hegel. The initial difference between Heidegger and Levinas with regard to the function of death causes the respective paths of the two thinkers to diverge, as Heidegger tirelessly pursues the hypostasis in the guise of ontological differentiation, while Levinas's meditation is barred from this path and must stabilize in a description of the relation to the Other. The One of the Ego Levinas versus Derrida-The Necessity of the One The emphasis of Violence and Metaphysics (1964), obscures the most fundamental problem with Levinas's work as a whole. …

Sanctity of Life, A Sense of Life, and Good Endings

Since the Terry Schiavo case the idea of sanctity of life has shown itself to be open to interpretations which seem too hard edged to be compatible with the kind of concern about human life that bioethics ought to be fostering. When we turn elsewhere for a concept that will do the work that is needed we find the phrase 'a sense of life' made famous by Martha Nussbaum. But what is meant by this? That it is linked to the sanctity of life seems inescapable but the link is problematic in a way that demands a closer inquiry, Nussbaum links it to a quasi-objective sense of a good life which raises issues of quality of life and not mere prolonging of life and yet seems to defuse the judgmental stance that is sometimes associated with the concept of quality of life. I settle on a reading in terms of subjectivity and the nature of the other (as encountered in the work of Levinas) such that an ethics of the subject as a being engaged with us in a distinctive way becomes the starting point of philosophical inquiry about human life and death. This then gives a sense in which the life of a human being is sacred but not in a way that favours its continuance in all circumstances but focuses our attention on the subjectivity at the centre of the life.

How Levinas Taught Me to Read Benjamin

Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" have been interpreted almost exclusively in relation to Marxist historical materialism and, in that context, inevitably found wanting, misunderstood as the unwelcome intrusion of mystical and voluntarist notions into a rational method of historical explanation. Levinas, although he never mentions Benjamin, nonetheless affords a better clue as to what Benjamin might have been trying to accomplish. The major distinction animating and structuring Levinas's work is that between ethics, or the ethical relation, and ontology, or the disclosure of being. One of the principal ways this distinction is elaborated is in terms of the contrast and conflict between the synchronizable time assumed by the historical memory belonging to the ontological project and the diachrony of the ethical relation, or the non synchronizable time, the posterior anteriority of the memory of radical separation and interiority. The distinction between synchronic temporalization and diachrony can enable a different understanding of the central concept of Benjamin's "Theses...", viz. "empty homogeneous time, and also thereby of the perspective of Benjamin's "angel of history" from which the liberatory(non-)activity of the Benjamininan historical materialist follows. What the historical materialist does in allowing the flow of time and thought to be arrested in the grand abridgement of a monadic image is to speak for those Others whose being has been functionalized within universal history.

Labour and the Corporation

This paper engages with two theories of the firm—those provided by law and economics and stakeholding—from the standpoint of how they engage with the labour interest. The paper then moves on to look at the nature of work and worklife in the modern corporation. The suggestion is that the reality of worklife is not captured by the theories of the firm as they currently stand for the reasons the paper gives. An alternative theory is posited which builds on the idea of ethical dialogue inspired by the work of Levinas.

The question of sacrifice

In this concentrated and detailed look at questions surrounding the act of sacrifice, Dennis King Keenan discusses both the role and meaning of sacrifice in our lives. Building on recent discussions on the gift and transcendence, Keenan covers new ground with this exploration of the religious and ethical issues that sacrifice entails. According to Keenan, sacrifice pays: one gets a return on one's investment; that is, one suffers to get to a moment of transcendent truth. But what does this economy of sacrifice mean for living an ethical life? Along the way to an answer, Keenan considers the views of Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Levinas, Blanchot, Irigaray, Derrida, Nancy, and Zizek. Keenan's work affords a sophisticated philosophical treatment of the question of sacrifice. Dennis King Keenan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, is the author of Death and Responsibility: The Work of Levinas.

Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed

By B. C. Hutchens. New York — London, Continuum, 2004. viii+191 pp. Pb £12.99. Aiming to achieve ‘a balanced clarity of insight and intuition that is much needed in the study of Levinas's thought today’ (p. vii), this advanced introduction describes Levinas as ‘undoubtedly one of the greatest Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century’ (p. 12). In a series of short, often dense chapters, it then runs through some of the principal issues with which Levinas deals: freedom, violence, language, scepticism, time, good and evil, suffering, justice, religion, technology, art, eroticism and gender. The stakes of Levinas's work are high, and Hutchens displays an assured philosophical touch across an impressive range of topics. Throughout, he endeavours to give clear, judicious definitions of problematic terms, emphasizing the ambitious nature of Levinas's thought but never simply accepting him on his own terms. In fact, this study turns out to be more polemical than one might have expected of an introduction, as Levinas's shortcomings are scrupulously exposed. Hutchens argues from an early stage that, ‘treacherous as it may sound in an introduction to a fine visionary thinker, it is respectable to entertain that Levinas's masterly vision is not relevant to contemporary ethical theory’ (p. 35); Levinas's notion of ethical responsibility may be no more than an empty caricature (p. 54); and his influence on the philosophy of religion is ‘even less substantial than his influence on ethical theories’ (p. 112). Readers might begin to wonder why they should bother with Levinas at all. Hutchens finds a few intriguing, even fascinating ideas, but has little sympathy for the grander claims sometimes made by Levinas's admirers. The final chapter outlines some of the ‘massive difficulties in interpreting [Levinas's] thought as relevant and contributive’ (p. 155); there are problems of scale, relevance and detail, his notions are ‘hazy’ (p. 156) and his concepts are ‘nebulous’ (p. 157). The chapter ends by outlining Alain Badiou's devastating criticisms of Levinas, and a brief Conclusion summarizes a few ideas that might be worth taking further, but which Levinas himself did not or could not develop. This is a very challenging approach to Levinas, perhaps too challenging to fulfil the role of an introduction. Rather than assisting uninitiated readers to tackle the extraordinary difficulties of Levinas's prose, it might persuade them that the effort is barely worthwhile. Its demand for intellectual clarity might also miss the fundamental point that Levinas's obscurities, ambiguities and hesitations contribute to the philosophical importance of his writing rather than diminishing it. In the end, it may be that different philosophical outlooks remain incompatible, despite everything that has been done to bridge them. What Derrida and others so admired about Levinas — his restless, relentless, inconclusive probing at the very foundations of thought and ethics — is what for some makes him frustrating and unreadable.

Strange Bedfellows

Much has been made within certain philosophic circles of Emmanuel Levinas's interaction with and critique of Western philosophy in general and German Idealism in particular. What is little recognized, however, is that J. G. Fichte is often the hidden target of this salvo. Indeed, Fichte appears within Levinas's work as one of the major foils against whom he attempts to define his own insights. When examined in light of Levinas's attack, however, Fichte's work actually appears to be in remarkable contiguity with Levinas. The aim of this paper is to illuminate these commonalities by making an apology for Fichte in light of Levinas's criticism. The result of this examination is the revelation that the German Idealism of such thinkers as Fichte, rather than rivaling Levinas's work, actually proves to be in many ways its ally and intellectual forerunner.

Julia Kristeva.

The Introduction to this book sets out its aims clearly: to provide readings of Julia Kristeva's most recent works and to review her earlier texts in the light of new directions in her thought. This is a useful and necessary undertaking, since some of the best introductions to her thinking were published just prior to the emergence of her volumes on revolt and on the feminine genius from 2000 onwards. In five chapters, the authors discuss key Kristevan questions of revolution and revolt, ethics, love and spectacle, passing through her theorization of the semiotic, the imaginary, melancholia and her re-figuration of Oedipus. Lechte and Margaroni interrogate her sustained involvement with psychoanalysis, her troubled relation to feminism, her work on semiotics, and her conception of politics. The book concludes with an interview in which Lechte and Kristeva talk about the trajectory of her thought in relation to the various strands of argument that run throughout the text. The most fascinating elements, for me, were Chapters 2 and 5. Chapter 2 focuses on the crisis of the paternal function and is impressive in its explication of Kristeva's return to Oedipus. Margaroni weaves together cogent discussion of Freud, Lacan and Kristeva on the question of identification, and illuminates the complexity of Kristeva's long-standing concern with the father. Chapter 5 explores Kristeva's understanding of the imaginary within what Guy Debord has termed the society of the spectacle. Lechte argues persuasively that Kristeva's work on the imaginary and revolt need to be thought about in relation to one another in order for us to understand the future of our imaginary. The other chapters are largely clear and interesting. Chapter 1 provides a lively opening to the volume through its focus on semiotics and revolution. Chapter 3 centres on Kristeva's psychoanalytic approach to love and melancholia. Chapter 4 is stimulating in the comparative approach to ethics that it proposes by turning to Emmanuel Levinas's work. The comparison with Levinas works best when it is woven into the body of the argument in this chapter. The list of terminological differences on pages 87–89 and the bullet point comparisons on pages 109–114 are rather too elliptical to do justice to the relations and contrasts between the two thinkers. On a publishing note, it would have been helpful to see an overarching rationale for the ‘Live Theory’ series at the beginning of the book. This, however, is not the responsibility of the authors, who have written an engaging text, which should prove to be a valuable addition to the existing range of introductions to Julia Kristeva's work.

An Ethics of Reading

I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the simplest acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading.1 Posing the Question: What is to Read? In his now notorious reading of Das Kapital, Louis Althusser-following he sees to be Marx's lead-asks what is to read?2 It is Althusser's question that frames the concerns of this essay. Now, may think of this an innocent question, but in this same piece Althusser warns us that any philosophical reading must be distinguished from an innocent reading; as there is no such thing an innocent he writes, we must say reading are guilty of (14). It is not my concern, here, to follow the contours of the guilty reading that Althusser goes on to elaborate,3 I merely suggest that his question-read in a certain way-makes possible to explore some preliminary thoughts concerning the ethics of how we, philosophers, read. I want to say-with Althusser-that there is indeed no innocent reading, and by this I mean that how read, how approach and respond to a text, is more than casually significant. There is a tendency for philosophers-of certain persuasions-to think of reading at best a kind of neutral activity, and is perhaps toward this kind of attitude that my preliminary comments are addressed.4 Emmanuel Levinas's work on the ethical response to the other serves a way of broadening out this question of how read, towards an elaboration of reading in ethical terms.5 I think that his nuanced accounts of philosophy is and does helps us to think about happens-in a traditional or conventional sense-when reads.6 Now, in the process of developing his account of ethical responsibility and obligation, Levinas uncovers the ways philosophy silently reduces all that reads back to its own categories or understandings. For example, he suggests that in the production of philosophical knowledge there appears: the notion of an intellectual activity or of a reasoning will-a way of doing something which consists precisely of thinking through knowing, of seizing something and making one's own, of reducing to presence and representing the difference of being, an activity which appropriates and grasps the otherness of the known. A certain grasp: an entity, being becomes the characteristic property of thought, is grasped by and becomes known. perception, concept, comprehension, refers back to an act of grasping. The metaphor should be taken literally: even before any technical application of knowledge, expresses the principle rather than the result of the future technological and industrial order of which every civilization bears at least the seed. The immanence of the known to the act of knowing is already the embodiment of seizure. This is not something applied like a form of magic to the 'impotent spirituality' of thinking, nor is the guarantee of certain psycho-physiological conditions, but rather belongs to that unit of knowledge in which Auffassen (understanding) is also, and always has been, a Fassen (gripping). The mode of thought known knowledge involve's man's concrete existence in the world he inhabits, in which he moves and works and possesses.7 Philosophy's mode of knowing-and this implicates the way reads-is to take the world, experience or the other in to itself in such a way that no trace or residue is left to testify to an alien otherness: Knowledge is representation, a return to presence, and nothing may remain other to it (77). Indeed, Simon Critchley echoes this well when he writes: Philosophy is defined by Levinas that alchemy whereby the Other is transmuted into the Same, an alchemy that is performed with the philosopher's stone of the knowing ego.8 Philosophy's mode of reading, in its most extreme (or pure? …

Le plaisir de la lecture Reading the Other Animal

Traditional empiricism, the stout defender of the senses, is by all accounts sick. But perhaps a certain empiricist legacy is still fighting for life. Without seeking a resurrection of empiricism, the aim of this paper is to engage in what Levinas calls a ‘rehabilitation of sensation’. I want to resist theorizations of our life that would seek to exclude our sensible relations with things and with others from any intrinsic involvement with our understanding of them; to resist conceptions that regard sensibility as something in itself dumb and brute, something (as tradition would have us have it) ‘merely animal’. However, the trajectory of this discussion will not remain in every part faithful to its Levinasian inspiration. And it will not leave the traditional conception of animality intact either. In what follows, what my five-year-old daughter calls our ‘humanality’ will not be elaborated in terms of (trans)formations of life that Levinas, with the tradition, calls a ‘break’ from ‘animality’ or from ‘the animal condition’. Every other, I want to affirm, is every bit an animal.

Contesting the Human

In his 1934 essay Some Thoughts on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, Levinas identified two major movements within contemporary culture: liberalism and Hitlerism. At one level, these two movements are in strict opposition, but Levinas's later work explores the way in which liberalism is implicated in the hatred of the other that pervades Hitlerism. In this paper, I argue that Cartesian dualism underlies two sorts of anxieties, both of which are expressed as racism. Levinas's reconception of the body as ethically significant overcomes this dualism, and thus seems to hold promise as a method for undoing contemporary manifestations of racism.