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

How best to avoid the Levinas Effect, as it has been called, the tendency to make Emmanuel Levinas everything to everyone? One way is to demonstrate that Levinas's thinking does not fit into any of the categories by which we ordinarily approach political theory. If one were forced to categorize Levinas's political theory, the term "inverted liberalism " would come closest to the mark. As long, that is, as one emphasizes the term "inverted" over "liberalism." Levinas's defense of liberalism is (...) likely the strangest defense the reader has encountered. We should, argues Levinas, foster and protect the individual because only the individual can see the tears of the other, the tears that even the just regime cannot see. The individual is to be fostered and protected for the sake of the other individual. Whether this has anything to do with "real" liberalism, and whether it should, is the topic of this essay. (shrink)

As such, this book is both a critique and a tribute to Rosenzweig and Levinas. The book contains an exhaustive bibliography of the comparative studies.

Stephen Darwall's The Second-Person Standpoint converges with Emmanuel Levinas's concern about the role of the second-person relationship in ethics. This paper contrasts their methodologies (regressive analysis of presuppositions versus phenomenology) to explain Darwall's narrower view of ethical experience in terms of expressed reactive attitudes. It delineates Darwall's overall justificatory strategy and the centrality of autonomy and reciprocity within it, in contrast to Levinas's emphasis on the experience of responsibility. Asymmetrical responsibility plays a more foundational role as a critical counterpoint to (...) 'mean-spirited' reciprocity than Darwall's laudable distinction between accountability and revenge, and responsibility even founds this distinction. The experience of being summoned to asymmetrical responsibility amplifies the meaning of 'authority', which is a presupposition for Darwall. Finally, asymmetrical responsibility helps develop decentred reasoning, invites risk beyond the boundaries of reciprocity at moments when autonomy appears endangered, reconciles respect and care at the experiential level, and presses to extend the scope of moral obligation. (shrink)

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and two extremely provocative thinkers whose reputations have grown considerably over the last twenty years, are rarely studied together. This is due to the disparate interests of many of their intellectual heirs. Strauss has influenced political theorists and policy makers on the right while Levinas has been championed in the humanities by different cadres associated with postmodernist thought. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, Leora Batnitzky (...) brings together these two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that they often had the same philosophical sources and their projects had many formal parallels. While such a comparison is valuable in itself for better understanding each figure, it also raises profound questions in the current debate on the definitions of 'religion', suggesting new ways that religion makes claims on both philosophy and politics. (shrink)

a product of human thought that betrays the lived uniqueness of persons, reducing ‘otherness’ to the categories of the understanding and to its historical consequences? Or is history too ‘thick’ to be synchronized in memory and historical consciousness? The article, taking its inspiration from Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation and particular moments of Latin American history, develops the notion of the proximity of history, phenomenologically critiquing Emmanuel Levinas’s own reduction of history to consciousness, his reading of history as a synchronizing (...) betrayal of diachronic events. It thus reads Levinas against his own texts, arguing that historical memory and historical encounters function much as the face does in Levinas’s own ethics, not only giving rise to irrecusable responsibilities, but also demanding the work of a critical, conscious appropriation of that history. Key Words: conquest • Dussel • ethics • history • Latin America • Levinas • proximity • responsibility. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to locate the precise moment in which reason becomes endowed with an ought. In stating the goal in this way, something has already been said about Kant and his project of grounding the metaphysics of morals. But in speaking of a moment (or an instant or an event or an occasion) in which reason becomes endowed with an ought, that is, a moment in which pure reason becomes practical, we have already headed off in (...) a direction beyond the metaphysics of morals. For by invoking the moment, we have invoked something concrete. This distinguishes the current project from the Kantian enterprise in that Kant sought the universal conditions of morality as they followed from a rationality already endowed with an ought. In so doing, he could identify that the ideas of morality and freedom were concomitantly related (along with reason itself), but he could not show that any of these ever materialized in concrete experience. Toward the end of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, he writes, "we have finally traced the determinate concept of morality back to the idea of freedom, but we could not prove freedom to be something actual in ourselves and in human nature" (GMM 51). On the next page, he writes: ... we are not as yet able to have any insight into why it is that we should divorce ourselves from such interest, i.e., that we should consider ourselves as free in action and yet hold ourselves as subject to certain laws so as to find solely in our own person a worth that can compensate us for the loss of everything that gives worth to our condition. We do not see how this is possible and hence how the moral law can obligate us. One must frankly admit that there is here a sort of circle from which, so it seems, there is no way to escape. (GMM 52. Emphasis is mine.) Even though Kant can align the concepts of freedom, reason and the moral law, it would seem that the obligating force of morality has slipped beneath his grip, and he is left to analyze the idea of moral obligation in its place.1 The present study seeks to return this idea of obligation to its origin.. (shrink)

The question of the source of the moral "ought" is no small question, nor is it unimportant. Our own philosophical tradition has dealt with the question in several ways producing a variety of answers. Some of these include locating the "ought" in the structure of reason (Kant), in the human being's desire for pleasure (Utilitarianism), or in the will of God (Aquinas). The reason why the question is so important is because different conceptions of the source of the moral (...) ought ultimately give rise to different conceptions of what is right and wrong; they also affect the way we answer the biggest of all ethical questions, why be good. (shrink)

Without a doubt, Levinas' principal concern in philosophy is how the self meets the Other. His magnum opus, Totality and Infinity, bears the subtitle, An Essay on Exterior- ity. Exteriority refers to a region beyond the horizons of the self, that which "is" beyond transcendental subjectivity. If there are such "beings" as other selves, that is, other subjects, they exist out there in the exterior. But if knowledge is confined to the interior—as Levinas says it must be—then the Other cannot (...) be known. He writes, "There is in knowledge, in the final account, an impossibility of escaping the self; hence sociality cannot have the same structure as knowledge" (EI 60). (shrink)

What is Levinas's relation to Hegel, the thinker who seems to summarize everything which Levinas's philosophy opposes, yet with whom Levinas never enters a sustained philosophical engagement? An answer can be found through an analysis of the concept of work, understood both as activity of labor and product thereof. The concept of work reveals that, despite the apparent (but superficial) sense of opposition, Levinas's philosophy works in a deliberately noncommittal, or, to use a Levinasian expression, ``dis-interested'' mode with respect to (...) Hegel. Such mode of disinterstedness expresses an ethical gesture of joyful hospitality that neither confirms nor refutes the German philosopher but rather opens him up to an eschatological dimension. (shrink)

This is a study of the way in which Levinas approaches the experience of human expression from two perspectives: firstly, as a pre-thematic or pre-cognitive ?experience,? which requires that he revisit Husserl's pre-objective intentionality and explore the relationship between the upsurge of sensation (?Urhylè?) and its ?intentionalization? as consciousness self-temporalizing. Thereafter, Levinas must contend with the implications of his own writing (his thematization and rhetoric), which includes his claims for the face. This implies that he must grapple with criticism to (...) the effect that he is providing a (foundationless) hermeneutics of face-to-face encounters (later, of an affective memory that repeats without recollected representations). Levinas acknowledges that his writing is a ?dramatique des phénomènes? and not a phenomenology of actions (Totality and Infinity, ?Preface?). How, then, to avoid charges of arbitrary description? How to step outside the primordiality of ?the phrase? (Lyotard) or the conceptualization that threatens claims to ?pure? phenomenology? This is really what is at stake in Levinas's second great work (1974). In this essay, I explore the role that ?substitution? plays in weaving together conceptuality and phenomenality. I contrast this with other forms of ?dramatization,? from narrative witnessing (Delbo, Kertesz), to minimalist sculpture (Giacometti). (shrink)

This essay studies the unfolding of Levinas' concept of transcendence from 1935 to his 1984 talk entitled "Transcendence and Intelligibility." I discuss how Levinas frames transcendence in light of enjoyment, shame, and nausea in his youthful project of a counter-ontology to Heidegger's Being and Time. In Levinas' essay, transcendence is the human urge to get out of being. I show the ways in which Levinas' early ontology is conditioned by historical circumstances, but I argue that its primary aim is formal (...) and phenomenological; it adumbrates formal structures of human existence. Levinas' 1940s ontology accentuates the dualism in being, between what amount to a light and a dark principle. This shift in emphasis ushers in a new focus for transcendence, which is now both sensuous and temporal, thanks to the promise of fecundity. Totality and Infinity (1961) pursues a similar onto-logic, while shifting the locus of transcendence to a non-sexuate other. The final great work, Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence (1974) offers a hermeneutic phenomenology of transcendence-in-immanence. It rethinks Husserl's focus on the transcendence of intentionality and its condition of possibility in the passive synthesis of complex temporality. If the 1974 strategy 'burrows beneath' the classical phenomenological syntheses, it also incorporates unsuspected influences from French psychology and phenomenology. This allows Levinas to develop a philosophical conception of transcendence that is neither Husserl's intentionality nor Heidegger's temporal ecstases, in what amounts to an original contribution to a phenomenology both hermeneutic and descriptive. (shrink)

In this paper I present Levinas' account of excendence in On Escape and Existence and Existents and show its continuity with his subsequent discussions of transcendence in Time and the Other, Totality and Infinity, and Otherwise than Being. I argue that Levinas' critique of the traditional idea of identity plays a decisive role in establishing the continuity between these various accounts as it provides the key to unlocking his account of transcendence as a formal structure. However, the meaning of trascendence (...) lies not in the structure but in its concretization. Although Levinas initially presents fecundity as the concretization of transcendence, he ultimately identifies it as ethics. This development explains why Levinas himself preferred to think of himself as a thinker of transcendence or the holy rather than to be identified with ethics. (shrink)

This book brings together the most interesting and far-reaching responses to the work of Levinas in three key areas: contemporary feminism, psychotherapy and Levinas's relation to other philosophers. This title available in eBook format. Click here for more information . Visit our eBookstore at: www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.

In this paper I explore the question of how toapproach the writings of Emmanuel Levinas fromthe point of view of education. I argue thatLevinas has challenged the modern conception ofsubjectivity which underpins modern education.Instead of providing a new conception ofsubjectivity, his work should be understood asan attempt to account for the awakening of theuniqueness of the subject in ethical terms. Thecentral idea is that we come into presencethrough responding, through taking up – or notdenying – the undeniable responsibility whichprecedes our (...) subjectivity. Levinas not onlyprovides us with a new way to `understand'subjectivity. `Responding' also suggests a wayto approach Levinas's writings that goes beyondthe simple application of his `truths' toeducational practice. Levinas's writingschallenge their reader to articulate a unique,unprecedented response. It is argued that thepapers to which this paper is a response alldisplay this approach to Levinas's writings. Itis further argued that `responding' is not onlya way to read Levinas, but ultimately a way tothink about education itself. To learn (fromLevinas) is to respond (to Levinas). (shrink)

The Face of the Other and the Trace of God contain essays on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and how his philosophy intersects with that of other philosophers, particularly Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Derrida. This collection is broadly divided into two parts: relations with the other, and the questions of God.

Emmanuel Levinas's concept of "the face of the Other" involves an ethical mandate that is presumably transcultural or, in his terms, "precultural." His essay "Meaning and Sense" provides his most explicit defense of the idea that the face has a meaning that is not culturally relative, though it is always encountered within some particular culture. Levinas identifies his position there as a "return to Platonism." Through a careful reading of that essay, exploring Levinas's use of religious terminology and the (sometimes (...) implicit) relationships of the essay to the work of other phenomenologists and of Saussure, the author seeks to clarify (1) what Levinas retains and what he rejects in returning to Platonism "in a new way," (2) the sense in which this return constitutes an "overcoming" of relativism, and (3) the nature of the phenomenological warrant that he offers for his position. (shrink)

This article draws in particular on existential-phenomenological notions of “witnessing.” Witnessing, often conceived in the context of testimony, obviously involves epistemological concerns, such as how we come to know through the experiences and reports of others. I shall argue, however, that witnessing as a mode of intersubjectivity offers understandings that involve questions about how people come to be. More specifically, I want to consider the positive potential of “witnessing” to disrupt intersubjective completeness or closure, particularly as this relates to work (...) on organizing subjectivities, as well as, in the field of organization studies. (shrink)

Critics of Levinas reject the notion that the abstract face of the other can ground ethics and generate specific responsibilities. To the contrary, I argue that the face does ground a practical and pragmatic ethics. Drawing on Levinas' phenomenological analyses of the enjoying subject, I show that the face communicates an imperative to the subject that obligates her or him to repair the concrete context of action in which the subject encounters the other. My elucidation takes very seriously the notion (...) that the face speaks and the face is a body. When coupled with a pragmatic account of communication, Levinas gives us a robust elucidation of the phenomenological and pragmatic dimensions of ethical responsibility. Key Words: embodiment • ethics • face • Emmanuel Levinas • phenomenology • pragmatics • responsibility. (shrink)

The motif of the ‘drama of being’ is a dominant thread that spans the entirety of Levinas's six decades of authorship. As we will see, from the start of his writing career, Levinas consciously frames the tension between ontology and ethics in a dramatic form. A careful exposition of this motif and other related theatrical metaphors in his work–-such as ‘intrigue,’ ‘plot,’ and ‘scene’–-can offer us not only a better appreciation of the evolution of Levinas's thought, but also of his (...) proper place within the western philosophical tradition. Levinas accuses western philosophers of being exclusively attuned to what he calls the ‘drama of existence.’ And even then, philosophers have eluded the implications of the tragic fatalism that define this drama. Philosophers are generally unaware of an ‘other scene’ that radically alters the fatalistic logic of the ontological drama. Levinas calls this other scene the ‘ethical intrigue.’. (shrink)

Lévinas’s harsh criticisms of the sacred have irked not just his critics but even some who sympathize with his work. Taken at face value, some of Lévinas’s comments concerning the sacred appear prejudicial towards non-monotheistic religions. But a closer reading of his analysis of the sacred shows that his preoccupation with the sacred has to do with a questionable “temptation” or disposition found in every human being. Drawing on the insights of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Lévy-Bruhl, Lévinas shows how this (...) temptation involves a primitive wish to escape one’s responsibilities as a human being. For Lévinas, the phenomenon of the sacred promotes the illusion of a direct and immediate experience of the absolute or the Infinite. Genuine transcendence, for Lévinas, is possible only within the ethical drama of self and Other. The apex of human life involves not the eclipsing of the self—the fundamental motivation behind the sacred—but a heightening of the self’s radical uniqueness that only moral engagement makes possible. (shrink)

In this paper I explain what is the difference between a book and a document according to Levinas. T hen I explain why, although he was very reluctant to read "cabalistic documents" he was interested by R. Haïm of Volozin's book, Nefesh HaHaïm, and even praised the French translation of the book as an event worth the attention of Jews, Christians and Muslims. T he main point is concerns his understanding of God "from our view point".

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century and is best known for his work on ethics and theology. Levinas and the Political explores Levinas' early writings in the face of National Socialism through to his controversial political statements on Israeli and French politics. Howard Caygill also explores Levinas' engagement with his contemporaries Heidegger and Bataille, and his re-thinking of the political for an understanding of the significance of the Holocaust.

The critique of intellectualism -- Good will and the face -- Good precedes evil -- Autonomy and heteronomy -- Sensibility and reason -- Intelligible character and anarchy -- The question of happiness -- Ethics and religion.

Examining Levinas's critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas's thought. The author suggests that though Levinas's conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger's philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded (...) from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas's philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics. (shrink)

Education has long been charged with the taskof forming and shaping subjectivity andidentity. However, the prevailing view ofeducation as a project of producing rationalautonomous subjects has been challenged bypostmodern and poststructuralist critiques ofsubstantial subjectivity. In a similar vein,Emmanuel Levinas inverts the traditionalconception of subjectivity, claiming that weare constituted as subjects only in respondingto the other. In other words, subjectivity isderivative of an existentially priorresponsibility to and for the other. Hisconception of ethical responsibility is thusalso a radical departure from the prevailingview (...) of what it means to be a responsible moralagent. In this paper, I use jazz improvisationas a metaphor to focus on three interrelatedaspects of ethical responsibility on Levinas'saccount: passivity, heteronomy, andinescapability. I then point toward some waysin which reframing responsibility andsubjectivity along this line might offer newpossibilities for conceiving subjectivity andmoral agency in education. (shrink)

Although Levinas talks about ethics as a response to the other, most scholars assume that this "response" is not something tangible—it is not an actual giving of food or providing of shelter and clothing. But there is evidence in Levinas's own writings that indicate he does intend for a positive response to the Other. In any event, while he acknowledges that the other is the sole person I wish to kill, killing the other, within an ethical framework would be a (...) violation of that response. The failure to respond to the other ethically requires us to ask if Levinas's project needs an educational philosophy or a model of moral cultivation to supplement it. This essay explores this question by putting into conversation Levinas's ethical project and his interest in Jewish education with John Dewey's philosophy of education and its relationship to the political community. This exploration will help us see what this field of research might offer in promoting the cultivation of ethical response as Levinas envisions it and what its limits are. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that because the significance of Western medicine lies in its ability to enhance the health of persons within a society, the practice of medicine is foremost an ethic and only thereafter a science. In support of the priority of an ethical perspective in medical practice, the paper explores the socio-cultural nature of knowledge, upon which science itself is constructed. Next, it draws from Levinas' philosophy, which illumines the problem of ontological and epistemological priority. Specifically, (...) it examines Levinas' rendering of the human face and of language, as they found the case for the priority of justice, or ethics. Finally, the paper offers the practice of narrative discourse as one solution that elevates the status of ethics within the institution of medicine and that has the potential to counteract the tendency in medical practice to employ a universalizing methodology based in science's power to control the human Other. (shrink)

Detailed exposition of the nine layers of signification of human mortality according to Emmanuel Levinas's phenomenological and ethical account of the meaning and role of death for the embodied human subject and its relations to other persons. Critical contrast to Martin Heidegger's alternative and hitherto more influential phenomenological-ontological conception, elaborated in "Being and Time" (1927), of mortality as Dasein's anxious and revelatory being-toward-death.

The reputation and influence of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-96) have grown powerfully in recent years. Well known in France in his lifetime, he has since his death become widely regarded as a major European moral philosopher profoundly shaped by his Jewish background. A pupil of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas pioneered new forms of exegesis with his postmodern readings of the Talmud, and as an ethicist brought together religious and non-religious, Jewish and non-Jewish traditions of contemporary thought. Richard A. Cohen has written (...) a book which uses Levinas' work as its base but goes on to explore broader questions of interpretation in the context of text-based ethical thinking. Levinas' reorientation of philosophy is considered in critical contrast to alternative contemporary approaches such as those found in modern science, psychology, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Ricoeur. Cohen explores a manner of philosophizing which he terms 'ethical exegesis'. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is now widely recognised alongside Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre as one of the most important Continental philosophers of the twentieth century. His abiding concern was the primacy of the ethical relation to the other person and his central thesis was that ethics is first philosophy. His work has also had a profound impact on a number of fields outside philosophy such as theology, Jewish studies, literature and cultural theory, psychotherapy, sociology, political theory, international relations theory and critical legal (...) theory. This volume contains overviews of Levinas's contribution in a number of fields, and includes detailed discussions of his early and late work, his relation to Judaism and talmudic commentary, and his contributions to aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This essay presents an argument for reconceptualizing subjectivity as orientational rather than foundational in nature. My focus is on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Immanuel Kant. I begin by summarizing Levinas''s theory of ethical subjectivity as a theory of the self where the internal and the external are in constant play. Then I turn to two works of Kant for resources to understand better the meaning of Levinas''s theory of the self. In "What is Orientation in Thinking?" Kant presents (...) a model for orientation in thought that I make use of as a basic framework for a model of orientational subjectivity. Then I analyze two feelings described by Kant in the third Critique which I argue can be understood as orientational feelings within such a model of orientational subjectivity: the feeling of sensus communis and the feeling of vocation. (shrink)

The rush of interference that produces gaps and unsettles cognition must be seen as a force that weighs in performatively and must be read. The interruptive moment of interference itself calls for a reading.Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular beings are. … Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional.Emmanuel Levinas maintains a crucial distinction between the Said (le Dit) and the Saying (le Dire): whereas the Said (...) names the realm of conceptual forms, themes, ideas—signified meaning—the Saying indicates a nonreferential performative intrusion that institutes, produces, transforms. Communication studies focuses .. (shrink)

: The main threads of Emmanuel Levinas's theory of ethics, developed in his philosophical works, Totality and Infinity (1969), and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998), instruct that ethics require transcendence of being and nature, which he describes in terms of a transcendence of animality to the human. This apparent devaluation of the nonhuman would seem to preclude the development of Levinasian environmental ethics. However, a deconstructive reading of Levinas recognizes a subtext that interrupts the main threads of his (...) argument running against the inclusion of nonhuman others in ethics. Through a critical reconstructive reading of Levinas, I develop an ethic extraneous to Levinas's transcendent ethics, an ethic outside his "otherwise than being.". (shrink)

This essay discusses Stanley Cavell’s remarkable interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought against the background of his own ongoing engagement with Wittgenstein, Austin, and the problem of other minds. This unlikely debate, the only extensive discussion of Levinas by Cavell in his long philosophical career sofar, focuses on their different reception of Descartes’s idea of the infinite. The essay proposes to read both thinkers against the background of Wittgenstein’s model of philosophical meditation and raises the question as to whether Cavell and (...) Levinas do not indirectly shed light on the early modern motif of the spiritual automaton. (shrink)

What, at this historical moment "after Auschwitz," still remains of the questions traditionally asked by theology? What now is theology's minimal degree? This magisterial study, the first extended comparison of the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, explores remnants and echoes of religious forms in these thinkers' critiques of secular reason, finding in the work of both a "theology in pianissimo" constituted by the trace of a transcendent other. The author analyzes, systematizes, and formalizes this idea of an (...) other of reason. In addition, he frames these thinkers' innovative projects within the arguments of such intellectual heirs as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, defending their work against later accusations of "performative contradiction" (by Habermas) or "empiricism" (by Derrida) and in the process casting important new light on those later writers as well. Attentive to rhetorical and rational features of Adorno's and Levinas's texts, his investigations of the concepts of history, subjectivity, and language in their writings provide a radical interpretation of their paradoxical modes of thought and reveal remarkable and hitherto unsuspected parallels between their philosophical methods, parallels that amount to a plausible way of overcoming certain impasses in contemporary philosophical thinking. In Adorno, this takes the form of a dialectical critique of dialectics in Levinas, that of a phenomenological critique of phenomenology, each of which sheds new light on ancient and modern questions of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. For the English-language publication, the author has extensively revised and updated the prize-winning German version. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to accentuate those features that distinguish Levinasian ethics from the egoism that prevails in management thought. It focuses on differences in the constitution of the subject, how Levinas seeks an ethics that goes beyond the subjective point of view that structures the self as being self-present, self-interested, free and systematic and relates to others through this perspective. Levinas's concepts are critically discussed by reading these alongside Jacques Lacan and Adam Smith, which enable observations (...) to be made about Levinas's concept of the Same and about the difference he effects between human and the nonhuman. It is concluded that it can be easy to misread Levinas in key respects in ways that may act to assimilate his thought to egoism. (shrink)

In this volume, political theorists, philosophers and legal scholars critically engage with this idealisation of Levinas ethics.

With almost a century of historical distance between Heidegger’s retrieval of the question of being and contemporary concern about the Other, we have accrued invaluable experiences for critical leverage about what it is to ask one another questions. I offer a sketch aimed at adapting Tillich’s theological system grounded in existential questioning to today by juxtaposing him with Levinas’ philosophical ethics. Tillich and Levinas provide motive for reflection on the topic of questioning in particular. In the case of Tillich, questions (...) constitute a crucial moment in the dialogue between our contemporary existential situation and religious symbols, or in what he called the ‘method of correlation.’ Furthermore, Tillich locates in the very structure of questioning the germ of our participation in our essential nature despite existential disruption. Beneath his more provocative and prophetic discourse on the absolute desolation and height of the Other, Levinas sees in questions a different kind of possibility. It is not our essential and existential selves, but oneself and the absolutely Other who come together in the question yet retain their infinite difference. Heidegger is the immediate predecessor from whom both Tillich and Levinas inherit a predilection for reflection on questioning. What is at stake is not merely the legacy of Heidegger’s construal of questioning, but, more importantly here, the fundamental sources Tillich and Levinas posit as the origin of our questioning. (shrink)

: What makes us think, and what makes us think as feminists? In seeking to answer these questions, this paper draws on both Deleuze and Guattari's account of the creation of concepts, and feminist thought on feminist thinking, before suggesting with Levinas that our relation to ideas is primarily affective. Via further engagement with Levinas, I argue that it is the relation to the other which provokes and produces thought; models of autonomous theorizing are thereby supplanted by the teaching of (...) the other. (shrink)