Work Of Levinas Research Articles

Ethics of Care Revisited: Gilligan and Levinas

Discussions of ethics in the Anglo-American philosophical community often begin and end with three traditions: deontological, utilitarian, and neo-Aristotelian. Of course, other orientations are often considered, such as the ethics of care, pragmatism, and discourse ethics, but for the most part these traditions tend to dominate. Continental theorists have drawn on a number of approaches to challenge the limitations of this trinity, and Emmanuel Levinas obviously comes to mind as a figure to whom many have turned in this regard. He is not only important in his own right. He has been a crucial resource for other theorists, for example, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Yet, in spite of his growing appeal in certain circles, he is not a thinker to whom one can readily appeal in order to challenge the triumvirate. This is due not only to the difficulty of his writings, but because of his desire to privilege "saying" over the "said" or the thematic. Needless to say, from Levinas's vantage point the language of these other traditions has been that of the thematic. The Western world has followed a path of violence toward the other for Levinas, and thematic approaches, which often involve argumentative modes of discourse, contribute to this violence. Violence is, no doubt, the great ethical problem for Levinas. Does not lucidity, the mind's openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives. In advance its shadow falls over the actions of men....The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy.1 In one sense it is a shame that Levinas's writings take the form that they do, for there are clearly themes in his work that could serve as valuable counters to much of what is taken for granted by the reigning ethical traditions. Levinas asks us to turn away from assumptions regarding reciprocity to the asymmetrical, to a responsibility for the other that can not be understood in terms of principles or utilitarian calculus, and away from self-interest in the domain of the ethical.2 As a purely pedagogical matter it would be of some value if there were a figure in the Anglo-American world who spoke to these concerns and whose work was more accessible than Levinas's writings. And interestingly enough there is such a figure, although she has been misread and her work often misrepresented. We refer to Carol Gilligan. There has been relatively little discussion of how Levinas's insights have affinities to those of Gilligan. In part this has been due to the fact that Gilligan has often been misunderstood, and in part because it is rather hard to believe that someone who has passed through the fires of the phenomenological tradition can have a kinship with someone schooled in empirical approaches of the social sciences. It is also due the fact that it is hard to imagine how Gilligan could navigate the transcendental turns of Levinas's work, that is, grapple with Levinas as a thinker who appears to be providing the conditions for the possibility of ethical response. This essay addresses possible connections between Carol Gilligan's work3 and that of Levinas and offers suggestions on why such a comparison would be fruitful-one that would contribute to the understanding of the part of the ethical relation that is "a centrifugal relation to the other, not a centripetal one."4 It doesn't intend to suggest that these thinkers are engaged in identical projects, for they are not. Yet, if we turn to the elements of Levinas's thought that speak to the actual behaviors of persons, then we are convinced that a fruitful comparison can be made. we take the position that the ultimate goal of the study of ethics is to make persons behave ethically. If the study of ethics is framed in this fashion, then Gilligan and Levinas have more in common than one might suppose, and even their differences are illuminating. …

Aliens and others: Between Girard and Derrida

In the work of Levinas, thought of the Other establishes an infinite responsibility and in that of Derrida's latest work an infinite duty of hospitality. Such thought nonetheless leaves a problem of judgement and decision. This paper uses the work of the French philosopher René Girard, and in particular his account of scapegoating, to critically discern between malign and benign otherness. It argues that a logic of undecidability needs an ethical hermeneutics capable of discerning between good and evil.

Sense and Icon

It is probably no overstatement to say that phenomenology, in the Husserlian tradition, is ultimately concerned with the constitution of sense. The problematic of the constitution of sense, to put it simply, interrogates the birth of sense and the conditions of that creative act.' In the Third Book of the Ideen, Husserl writes that phenomenology is the science of `origins,' of the 'mothers' of all cognition; and it is the maternal ground of all philosophical method: to this ground and to the work in it, everything leads back.2 It is important to note that this conception of phenomenology widens the field of research. Contrary to popular images of the Husserlian project-viz., that it is consumed by the operative conception of a Cartesian notion of origin and ground-this passage describes the fundamental aim of phenomenology as the interrogation and articulation of that which gives birth to meaning. The project is programmatically set up without prior juridical constraints. This is to say, Husserl evokes maternal imagery for the express purpose of orienting the phenomenologist toward that from which all sense arises. This orientation, it is important to add, is prior to Husserl's famous decision for a non-worldly, transcendental ego. For Husserl the philosopher (as opposed to Husserl the programmatic thinker) the final "mother" is the transcendental ego, and this conclusion has led many to see phenomenology as purely and simply an egological science. But what if sense were to be born otherwise than the ego? What if the ego, in the sense Husserl ascribes to it, were itself born, constituted? How could we describe and account for this other maternal ground? What phenomenological tools are necessary for such a paradoxical description-a description paradoxical precisely because the very subject who describes is always late to the conditions of its own birth? In the following reflections, we will investigate the resources in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion for describing this other ground of sense, this other site of birth. The importance of such resources comes from their ability to answer the question that lies at the very heart of the contemporary critique of phenomenology: what remains for phenomenology in the face of radical alterity? I In Levinas's work, we find a twofold sense of Sinngebung. It is unfortunate that this double concept of sense-bestowal has been overlooked by his commentators, for in it lie some of the most profoundly original contributions Levinas has made to the phenomenological tradition. By nuancing the phenomenological notion of Sinngebung, Levinas reminds us of both the reliance of Husserl's employment of sense-bestowal upon the free ego3 and the fecundity of the bestowal of sense when taken up in the context of the genesis of the responsible subject. Hence, we will find Levinas within the span of only three years-1959 to 1961-evoking the limits of a theory of sense, while at the same time identifying sense-genesis with ethics. This double concept of sense comes, of a certain phenomenological necessity, from Levinas's observation in "Reflexions sur la 'technique' phenomenologique" that "all givens (toute donnee) . . . are moments of the work of Sinngebung."4 In the context of that essay, Levinas is primarily concerned with how empirical givens are products of the work of sense-bestowing consciousness, but this claim extends further to the ethical problematic: how I am given to myself as for-the-other is a sense bestowed upon me from the other? This is at least one aspect of the other as teacher. The other teaches me the most profound of lessons: who I am and what it means to say "me" (moi). Who I am, what it means to be myself, is a sense that, in the ethical relation, is bestowed upon me from outside the egoic interiority of my self. The subtlety of Levinas's treatment of the problem of sense can be seen when we realize that this "experience"5 is both the limit of idealism (the disposition that first discovered sense-bestowing acts) and the marker of another direction in the constitution of sense. …

Responsibility and Death

The crypto- or mysto-genealogy of responsibility is woven with the double and inextricably intertwined thread of the gift and of death: in short of the gift of death. Derrida, The Gift of Death Responsibility, like many words in Emmanuel Levinas's work, lends itself to being too easily read. It is, for Levinas, a profoundly enigmatic concept. This concept-again, like many in Levinas's work-possesses a genealogy and calls for being read accordingly. It possesses a genealogy that turns back upon itself, calls an initial reading into question, thereby calling for a reading that necessarily, yet impossibly, thinks together two otherwise contradictory moments. I would suggest that the genealogy of responsibility be read alongside the genealogy of death. Derrida's The Gift of Death will initially provide the framework for this reading. Despite the fact that the part of The Gift of Death that I am considering is overtly a reading of Jan Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, it is also, I would suggest, a supplement to Derrida's other readings of the work of Levinas. The Gift of Death begins with a reading of one of the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History of the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka: Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why? The reading traces a genealogy of responsibility: demonic or orgiastic mystery, Platonic mystery, Christian mystery. Each conversion from one mystery to the next conserves something of what is interrupted. This logic of conservative rupture, Derrida suggests, resembles the economy of a sacrifice and sometimes reminds one of the economy of sublation [releve] or Aufhebung. In order to describe this double conversion, turns to incorporation (pfiveleni) and repression (potlaceni): Platonic mystery incorporates demonic or orgiastic mystery and Christian mystery represses Platonic mystery. This vocabulary indicates-if, as Derrida asks, meant to give these words the meanings that they possess in psychoanalytic discourse-that in the conversion from one mystery to another the first is not destroyed, but kept inside unconsciously, after effecting a topical displacement and a hierarchical subordination.1 This language also suggests-again, if these words were meant to be given the meanings that they possess in psychoanalytic discourse-that conversion amounts to a process of mourning, to keeping within oneself that whose death must be endured (DM 18/GD 9). Even if these words were not meant to have these meanings, nothing prevents one, Derrida suggests, from experimenting with a psychoanalytic reading, or at least a hermeneutics that takes psychoanalytic concepts corresponding to these words into account. This is especially true given that Derrida's reading concentrates on (or mystery), which cannot remain immune to the psychoanalytic ideas of incorporation and repression. At various moments in genealogy Derrida draws attention to structures in the work of Heidegger and Levinas that are to structures in the work of Patocka. In what follows I will not only remain attentive to the analogies mentioned by Derrida, but also suggest others. It is important to point out, however, that I am not suggesting that one can reconcile the work of Patocka with the work of either Heidegger or Levinas. When Derrida suggests that a structure in Patocka's work is analogous to a structure in Heidegger's work, he prefaces his remark by writing: wanting to neglect the essential differences (DM 23/GD 15). When I suggest that Derrida's reading of Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History is a supplement to Derrida's other readings of the work of Levinas, or when I suggest that there are certain structures in the work of Patockaa and Levinas, I (like Derrida) do it without wanting to neglect the essential differences. What is at stake in the genealogy of the conversion from one secrecy (or mystery) to another is the gift of death. …

Levinas, substitution, and transcendental subjectivity

The task of this paper is to clarify the status and implications of Levinas's insistence on the necessity of subjectivity to the ethical relation. Focusing in particular on the discussion of substitution in Otherwise than Being, it is argued that the description of subjectivity as substitution enables Levinas to articulate the necessity of the subject to the approach of the other in a manner which avoids the transcendental character which such claims to necessity usually embody. This argument proceeds from an initial characterization of substitution within the constellation of themes pursued by Levinas in Otherwise than Being to a detailed examination of the first four sections of the “Substitution” chapter. The essay concludes by noting the unity of the ethical exceeding of the transcendental character of subjectivity with the project which animates Levinas's work from its beginnings: the exceeding of the ontological by the ethical.

Facing the other: the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the key philosophers in the post-Heideggerian field and an increasingly central presence in contemporary debates about identity and responsibility. His work spans and encapsulates the major philosophical and ethical concerns of the twentieth century, combining the insights of a basic phenomenological training with the demands of a Jewish culture and its basis in the endless exegesis of Talmudic reading. His concerns and subjects are wide: they include the Other, the body, infinity, women, Jewish-Christian relations, Zionism and the impulses and limits of philosophical language itself. This collection explicates Levinas's major contribution to these debates, namely the idea of the primacy of ethics over ontology or epistemology. It investigates how, in the wake of a post-structuralist orthodoxy, scholars and practitioners in such fields as literary theory, cultural studies, feminism and psychoanalysis are turning to Levinas's work to articulate a rediscovered concern with the ethical dimension of their discipline. Stressing the largely assumed but unexplored Jewish dimension of Levinas's work, this book is an important contribution to the field of Jewish studies and philosophy.

From Communicative Action to the Face of the Other

Of those who have influenced contemporary renewal of moral theory in continental philosophy, Jurgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas are surely most important. Finding resonances in quite different and often opposing schools of thought, Habermas's discourse ethics has brought a new level of energy and sophistication to cognitive, Kantian approaches to ethics while Levinas's meditations on moral significance of other have inspired, though not uncritically, a wide range of postmodernist attempts to get beyond that Kantian legacy.1 But though they are both inescapably important for an array of debates in contemporary moral theory, they are rarely critically evaluated in relation to one another.2 There are, no doubt, many reasons for this. The differences in their philosophical styles, for example, are like night and day, with Habermas practicing a rigorously argumentative and technical mode of critical theory while Levinas engages in his own often poetic and always dense version of phenomenological analysis.3 Their basic agendas are different as well, with Habermas's discourse ethics framed in terms of a general concern with democratic political theory while Levinas's work is largely indifferent, if not hostile, to political concerns. Beyond these obvious contrasts, however, there is a striking, though problematic, convergence in their work with respect to foundations of our sense of moral obligation in language. It is at this level that I will approach work of Habermas and Levinas in this essay, arguing that their differing accounts of moral dimensions of language can be seen as equally indispensable aspects of our moral experience. In particular, I will argue that Levinas's understanding of language as a substantive relation to other can be seen to supplement and correct some of shortcomings of Habermas's procedural understanding of language as a rulegoverned practice, while procedural dimension of language emphasized by Habermas must be understood as a condition for articulate emergence of substantive dimension stressed by Levinas. In this way, I hope to suggest how their accounts may be productively brought together to provide a more adequate understanding of way moral point of view is established within language, responding, along way, to questions concerning character of a moral theory that would encompass Levinasian insights. Because of greater difficulty of project, most of essay will be devoted to arguing for cogency and relevance of Levinas's position in relation to shortcomings of Habermas's. But my aim is, nonetheless, to make a case for their mutual value to moral theory. For Habermas's analysis of procedures of argumentative discourse and Levinas's account of substantive value of face of other person evoke dimensions of language which are not only equally important to moral point of view but crucial to one another in its constitution. Habermas and Levinas on Moral Significance of Language Habermas's position has been stated most fully in his essay Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification, in which he attempts to justify the universal validity of principle of universalization4 that underlies cognitive or Kantian inspired approaches to ethics. As he proposes it, principle of universalization is just idea that no norm can be valid unless all affected can accept consequences and side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for satisfaction of everyone's (65). It is this principle that constitutes moral point of view, for Habermas, requiring of everyone a willingness to take concerns of others who be affected by a particular norm into account in its justification. Amorally justified principle is, in short, one that is fair to interests of concerned. Citing skeptical challenge that this understanding of moral point of view might be only expression of particular moral ideas of our Western culture,5 Habermas attempts to establish validity of principle of universalization as an unavoidable presupposition of any fully human life. …

The burnt book: reading the Talmud

In a profound look at what it means for new generations to read and interpret ancient religious texts, rabbi and philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin offers a postmodern reading of the Talmud, one of the first of its kind. Combining traditional learning and contemporary thought, Ouaknin dovetails discussions of spirituality and religious practice with such concepts as deconstruction, intertextuality, undecidability, multiple voicing, and eroticism in the Talmud. On a broader level, he establishes a dialogue between Hebrew tradition and the social sciences, which draws, for example, on the works of Levinas, Blanchot, and Jabes as well as Derrida. The Burnt Book represents the innovative thinking that has come to be associated with a school of French-Jewish studies, headed by Levinas and dedicated to new readings of traditional texts.

Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness–Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, Celan by Krzysztof Ziarek

Book Reviews Krzysztof Ziarek. I n f l e c t e d L a n g u a g e : T o w a r d a H e r m e n e u tic s o f N e a r n e s s — H e id e g g e r , L e v in a s , S te v e n s , CfeLAN. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. 239. Paper $18.95. Krzysztof Ziarek’s conversation with Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, and Celan probes the possibilities of thinking the other beyond the alterity-nullifying strategies of representa­ tion. Through the readings of “ the poetic” in Heidegger, mostly in his later essays on poetry and language, the study questions the opposition between ontology that does not account for the other and ethics that gives priority to absolute alterity. The Levinasian con­ text allows Ziarek to thematize the ethical in Heidegger as always underwriting the question of Being: language viewed as a response to the call of Being is already subtended by respect­ ful listening to the other. Conversely, the circumspect analysis of Heidegger’s encounter with the poets yields new insights into the articulations of alterity in the work of Levinas and Celan, the ethical thinkers par excellence. The study proposes an ethico-ontological model of approaching otherness, which brings ontological and ethical alterity to bear upon each other without obliterating the chiasmatic nature of the relation between them. The suggested model of the post-Heideggerian her­ meneutics of nearness points to the underlying “ ethicity” of language—its obligation to do justice to the other’s essential unpresentability. This ethical injunction of indebtedness to the other arrives prior to language’s processes of signification. The readings of Heidegger’s texts in the first two chapters of the book initially fore­ ground the notion of ontological alterities, stemming from the nearing of thinking and Being in Ereignis, and its unwordable closeness to the phenomenal, that is, to its “ alwaysamiss ” articulation in the way-making of language. The same motif will be taken up in the fourth chapter, which discusses Wallace Stevens’ oeuvre as a poetic counterpart of Heidegger’s exploration of language. In the meantime, however, the chapter on Levinas stresses that, unlike ontological alter­ ity in which one and the other stand in a reciprocal relation, the ethical comportment towards the other precludes symmetry and reversibility. Ziarek notes the emphasis on direc­ tionality in Levinas: it manifests itself not only in the unilaterality of the ethical relation but also in the fact that the non-sign of the other, which “ magnetizes” language and always pre-disposes it ethically, is a trace of the direction of its passage. Interestingly, this Levinasian perspective allows Ziarek to uncover a hidden mesh of vectors in Heidegger’s own “ way-languaging,” through which the relation between Being and thinking is revealed to be already inflected by the directionality of language towards the other. As a matter of fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of Inflected Language is its own unthematized vectorization , as indicated in the title by the preposition “ toward.” The study arrives at a discussion of Celan’s poetry as a concerned address to the other. Celan’s supreme articulations of alterity seem to bring into proximity Heidegger’s onto­ logical alterity and Levinas’s ethical alterity. Nevertheless, the Heideggerian underpinning of Celan’s work intensifies the question, implicitly asked by Celan himself, why the open­ ing to the other in Heidegger’s thought did not compel him to address the atrocities of the Holocaust or his own involvement with nazism. Considering the complexity of Celan’s twofold conceptualization of otherness, Ziarek’s definition of his poetry as “ acceptance of the gift of otherness” seems somewhat prob­ lematic, It obscures the disparity between the notion of the gift o f the other in the onto­ logical model (as proposed, writes Ziarek, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heideggerian reading of Vol. XXXV, No. 3 89 L ’E sprit C réateur Celan) and the gift fo r the other in Levinasian ethics, where “giving” is oriented only towards the other and depends on the non-reciprocity of...

Responsible subjectivity: Levinas and humanistic psychology.

Abstract The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas provides a non‐Cartesian description of human subjectivity which differs from other post‐structuralists. Levinas's subject is pre‐volitionally responsible. This article is intended to be a prolegomenon for psychologists interested in developing notions of theory and praxis from Levinas's work on the self qua subjectivity. It introduces some of the necessary concepts needed to understand Levinas's work. Possible areas for psychological investigation, in light of Levinas's work, are offered.

Le secret qui nous habite

Catherine Chalier provides here a reply to a few questions about her writings. She was concerned early on with the problem of the feminine and women, especially in the work of Levinas, but the problem, which is in her vision more ethical than political, is not an exclusive one. ; Her investigation does not take place within the Greek tradition but within the Jewish heritage, a heritage that women as well as men ought to interpret. In Les matriarches, she analyses significant women of the Bible. In L'Alliance avec la nature, she scrutinizes the import of nature in Jewish thought. In her view, what inspires a philosophical thought can never be defined : it is a secret.

LO POLÍTICO EN EL PENSAMIENTO DE EMMANUEL LÉVINAS: UNA LECTURA DE TOTALIDAD E INFINITO

Este artículo explora las implicaciones políticas del pensamiento de Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995), a partir de una lectura de su obra Totalidad e Infinito. Se observa que todopensamiento e implicación política en Lévinas cuenta con un fundamento ético, que a suvez se configura a partir de la idea de Infinito y del Deseo metafísico de lo absolutamente Otro a que da lugar. El pensamiento de este filósofo de origen lituano nos invita arecuperar la humanidad y, en consecuencia, a no permitir que se instaure la inhumanidaden nuestras interacciones, desde una subjetividad capaz de hacerse cargo éticamente del Otro. Esto obliga a buscar estrategias concretas para instaurar en la cotidianidadrelaciones políticas de hospitalidad y respeto por la pluralidad. Partiendo de laperspectiva de una antropología de la fragilidad, no habría otro camino que poner encomún las fragilidades y, al hacerlo, procurar crear un mundo habitable entre-todos.