Emmanuel Levinas

Review of Drew Dalton, Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009).

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)

In _Essential Vulnerabilities, _Deborah Achtenberg contests Emmanuel Levinas’s idea that Plato is a philosopher of freedom for whom thought is a return to the self. Instead, Plato, like Levinas, is a philosopher of the other. Nonetheless, Achtenberg argues, Plato and Levinas are different. Though they share the view that human beings are essentially vulnerable and essentially in relation to others, they conceive human vulnerability and responsiveness differently. For Plato, when we see beautiful others, we are overwhelmed by the beauty of (...) what is, by the vision of eternal form. For Levinas, we are disrupted by the newness, foreignness, or singularity of the other. The other, for him, is new or foreign, not eternal. The other is unknowable singularity. By showing these similarities and differences, Achtenberg resituates Plato in relation to Levinas and opens up two contrasting ways that self is essentially in relation to others. (shrink)

In this essay, I shall describe both Plato and Levinas as philosophers of the other, and delineate their similarities and differences on violence. In doing so, I will open up for broader reflection two importantly contrasting ways in which the self is essentially responsive to—as well as vulnerable to violence from—the other. I will also suggest a new way of situating Levinas in the history of philosophy, not, as he himself suggests, as one of the few in the history of (...) philosophy who has aphilosophy of the other but, instead, as one of a number of 20th century philosophers who turn to pre-modern thinkers for aid in critiquing early modern thought on a variety of topics, including whether the self is essentially closed or, instead, vulnerable, open and responsive to what is outside it. (shrink)

This study explores the primacy of interrelating and its ecopsychological significance. Grounded in evidence from everyday experience, and in dialogue with the phenomenology of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we discover that humans are inherently relational beings, not separate egoic subjects. When experienced intimately , this realization may transform our interrelationship with the beings and presences in the community of nature. Specifically, interrelating is primary in three ways: 1) interrelating is always already here, transpiring from the beginning of (...) the human species and human culture, from the beginning of every infant's life, and from the continuously arising beginning of every presencing moment; 2) the quality of our interrelating is truly what matters most, the most important expression of and facilitator of health, compassion, and justice for humankind and the rest of nature; and 3) interrelating is the ever-present path via which we discover/create and carry on our existence. Interrelating is an existential given—indeed we are our interrelating—yet we are summoned ethically to cultivate our way of interrelating so as to serve others and the non-human natural community. Thus interrelating is our essence, our calling, and our path. (shrink)

This thesis contributes to the discussion of two questions central to the scholarly study of the work of Emmanuel Levinas: the question of the nature of his hermeneutics, and the question of the nature of the relationship between his philosophy and his religion. The thesis consists of an extended examination of how and why Levinas reads certain of the sources of Judaism. I watch him utilizing images, ideas and quotations from the Bible, Kabbalah and Talmud in support of his larger (...) philosophical project, a project which consists mainly of a polemic against modern ontology---philosophical and political---and against the hermeneutic of reification which supports that ontology. The Bible, Kabbalah and Talmud become, in Levinas' reading, weapons in a battle against Hegelianism, Nazi totalitarianism, and modern progressivist liberalism; or, more precisely, they come to represent ways of turning away from the battles these structures inscribe towards a prophetic peace. (shrink)

The ideas here sketched they constitute a theoretical-general, inspired proposal of character, mainly, in the thought philosophical Latin American of such authors as: Paulo will Fry, Juan Carlos Scannone, Enrique Dussel and Alejandro Moreno among others. We consider that the answers around the part..

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)

'Original and provocative . . . engagingly written. (C Fred Alford) counters Levinas's notorious obscurity with a goodly dose of transparency' - John Lechte, Macquarrie University Abstract and evocative, writing in what can only be ...

Our essay examines Levinas's ideas of time and their relation to his ethical discourse. We read 'his' texts deconstructively and show how the notions of time and of the ethical are closely inter connected. We argue that Levinas deconstructs the concept of time, as it is traditionally developed by Western philosophy, and that this concept is part and parcel of and cannot be detached from his philo sophical venture. By following two major shibboleths, jouissance and language, we trace the deconstructive (...) effort of Levinas to dismantle Western philosophy's traditional conceptualization of time. Our dis cussion points not to the failure of Levinas's toil but rather to the aporetic structure of his itinerary and to the ethical significance of this aporia. (shrink)

In this essay I return to the difficult relation between the ethics and politics of Emmanuel Levinas through his critique of "paganism" and "primitivism." I argue that Levinas' central philosophical claims are fundamentally constituted by his problematic conceptions of so-called primitive life. Thus unlike current scholarship which has tried to put a wedge between Levinas' ethics and his politics, I suggest that one way to make Levinas' contributions meaningful in a global world is to unhinge the philosophy from the beginning. (...) Building on the dialogue between Levinas and Derrida, as well as contemporary anthropology, I argue that we can make an orginary agnostic moment prior to his work, which might allow us to think through a plurality of ethical subjectivities. (shrink)

Despite his final call for peace and "the wisdom of love", Emmanuel Levinas inevitably spoke of violence, and perhaps spoke even more of it. His call for infinite responsibility is actually crystallized through discourse on violence and suffering. We may say that these themes served as catalysts to the standing theory and, ethically, to any responsible Self. Violence, at least as a concept, poses itself as a significant presence to Levinas' plantilla while it reaches unexplored dimensions that await phenomenology and (...) vital thought. As a part of his ethical proposal, understanding violence becomes important so that the Self may go beyond it while reaching the Other. (shrink)

This paper is a presentation of Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of corporeality that shows struggling dialectic from a phenomenology of a sensible subject towards an ethics of transcendence. With the author’s attempt to show that the Good is given and received through sensibility held by the body dwelling in the world, she proposes that the seeming conflict between the seeming corporeal pull to dwelling as against the Desire to take an ethical flight can be settled when one courageously confronts the following (...) truths about humanity: that human beings are, 1) more than their thoughts, as 2) they are made of flesh and blood and that 3) they are in and thus influenced by the world. Through the work of corporeality, the subject is weakened by pain despite virility, suffers despite being at home and longs for a sublime unknown in the face of plenitude. By the stern conviction that existence can also be obscure and indefinite for consciousness to old, Levinas is able to explain how an egoistic subject is humbled and prepared to welcome the Other. (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.

Levinas' thinking in Totality and Infinity is centered on the relation with the Infinite. This relation is paradoxical. To be possible, the experience of a separated subject is postulated as a transcendental presupposition. But this separation is at the same time unthinkable without the Infinite. In his main work, The Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig stimulates the thinking of this relation. The renewal of Levinas' thinking of the paradox is made possible by phaenomenology . But the confrontation with Husserl indicates (...) the limit of Levinas' thinking: the asymmetrical relation with the Infinite is unthinkable without the acceptance of some kind of symmetry. (shrink)

For many, the Holocaust made thinking about ethics in traditional ways impossible. It called into question the predominance of speculative ontology in Western thought, and left many arguing that Western political, cultural and philosophical inattention to universal ethics were both a cause and an effect of European civilization's collapse in the twentieth century. Emmanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein respond to this problem by insisting that ethics must be Western thought's first concern. Unlike previous thinkers, they locate humanity's source (...) of universal ethical obligation in the temporal world of experience, where human suffering, rather than metaphysics, provides the ground for ethical engagement. All three thinkers contend that Judaism’s key lesson is that our fellow human is our responsibility, and use Judaism to develop a contemporary ethics that could operate with or without God. _Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust_ explores selected works of Levinas, Wiesel, and Rubenstein for practical applications of their ethics, analyzing the role of suffering and examining the use each thinker makes of Jewish sources and the advantages and disadvantages of this use. Finally, it suggests how the work of Jewish thinkers living in the wake of the Holocaust can be of unique value to those interested in the problem of ethics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Presenting a thorough investigation of the work of Levinas, Wiesel and Rubinstein, this book is of key interest to students and scholars of Jewish studies, as well as Jewish ethics and philosophy. (shrink)