Emmanuel Levinas

If for Caputo the universality of desire as self-appropriation and the singularity of the gift as desire-beyond-desire depend on and interweave with each other, they nevertheless do so as the communication between discrete and separable moments, that of the `sensible, rational circle of time' and the `exceeding and surpassing of ourselves'. The subject for Caputo seems to function as the temporary self-identity of construct. It is the "desire for restitution, fulfillment, reappropriation, well being". This agent-subject "always intends to act for (...) its own good". He says without this willing well-being "the subject/agent would never do a thing, nothing would happen or eventuate". Caputo's equating of the subject with a moment of re-appropriation ( he says `making an exhibit of ourselves', but can we make an exhibit of ourselves without unintentionally exiting from ourselves?) exemplifies the attempt to retain a remnant of a structuralist center as only the instant of contingency itself. In so doing, Caputo reifies what Derrida puts into question. (shrink)

A prevalent interpretation of Heidegger today is what I will call for the sake of convenience, the Levinasian reading. According to this perspective, Heidegger's Being as Ontological Difference grapples with the contradiction between the subjectivism of representationality and the absolute other to representation. But the concept of Being as Ontological difference risks risks being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Derrida argues that the Levinas reading mistakes the ontic for the ontological. Being is not a concept, the ontological (...) difference is not the difference between the subjective and the empirical, but difference WITHIN the subjective and the empirical. (shrink)

Au point de départ de l'entreprise philosophique de Lévinas, il y a cette ambition et ce projet, repris de Heidegger, de distinguer une différence qui s'affirmerait en tant que différence ontologique. Si les premières œuvres réalisent un tel programme, il demeure qu'elles témoignent aussi d'une insatisfaction et de la nécessité de dégager une intrigue différentielle orientée et déployée autrement: le domaine ontologique se montrerait, en toute manière, affecté d'une limitation, un affranchissement serait alors requis — mais la possibilité de thématiser (...) le dépassement qui s'impose semblerait cependant gravement compromise. Nous nous proposons ici d'analyser le principe de cette résistance à l'ontologie qui se signifie intimement et radicalement chez Lévinas dans le contexte des œuvres du début; il s'agit, plus précisément, d'établir la genèse d'une insuffisance déclarée, de fixer la logique de cette impuissance qui entrave et définit la pensée lévinassienne de l'être, logique où un certain usage du négatif intervient d'une façon, croyons-nous, déterminante. L'examen d'une détermination décisive, qui pèse initialement et qui ne cessera de peser sur la philosophie de Lévinas, permet de découvrir le lien structural profond qui rattache une économie de l'être entravée au principe salvateur que l'œuvre de la maturité aura la charge d'établir: le recours à la notion libératrice d'une transcendance révélée se pose chez Lévinas dans la stricte conséquence d'un emploi contrarié de la négation au sein du propos ontologique. (shrink)

Jean Mair, au début du XVIe siècle, entreprend de montrer que linfini existe en acte. Son traité De l'Infini prolonge les débats du XIVe siècle sur l'infini et le continu. Le problème de l' infini y est traité d'une manière principalement logique. L'infini est un terme qui a plusieurs sens selon son usage dans des propositions. La distinction centrale est celle de l'infini au sens catègorématique et de l'infini au sens synatégorématique. Mais si les auteurs du XIVe siècle admettent tous (...) l'infini au sens syncatêgorématique, la plupar récusent l'être en acte de l' infini au sens catègorématique. C'est à ce dernier point que Jean Mair consacre l'essentiel de sa réflexion. A l'intérieur d'un cadre qui reste aristotélicien par sa problématique d'ensemble et la formulation des questions, il renverse, grâce aux outils conceptuels de la logique terministe, une thèse centrale dans l'aristotélisme. Son traité contribue ainsi à développer l'idée que l'infini peut exister dans la nature. At the beginning of the 16th Century, Jean Mair set out to prove that the infinite exists Hot just potentially but actually. His treatise Propositum de infinito prolonged the 14th Century debates over the infinite and continuity, and it dealt logically with the problem of the infinite. The infinite is a term that has several meanings, depending upon its usage in propositions. The distinction between the categorematic and syncategorematic infinites is the central one in the treatise. If 14th Century authors by and large accepted the syncategorematic infinite, the majority challenged the existence of an actual infinite in the case of the categorematic infinite. Jean Mair devoted the bulk of his reflections to the latter situation. Within a framework that remained thoroughly Aristotelian, both in his overall problematic, as well as in the way he formulated questions, Mair overturned a central Aristotelian thesis, with the aid of conceptual tools from terminist logic. In this way his treatise contributed to the development of the idea that the infinite can exist in nature. (shrink)

Cet article se propose d'interroger la notion d'ipséité chez Lévinas et M. Henry, dans la mesure où ces pensées ont en commun de rechercher l'ipséité en deçà de l'intentionnalité, dans l'expérience du se sentir, que M. Henry nomme « affectivité ». Il s'agit de montrer dans un premier temps, en nous appuyant principalement sur De l'existence à l'existant, que la pensée de Lévinas, souvent comprise comme une pensée de la transcendance soi-disant opposée à l'immanence henrienne, comporte un moment d'immanence, plus (...) précisément, qu'elle découvre cette transcendance dans l'immanence du se sentir. Mais, tandis que M. Henry oppose l'affectivité à la sensibilité, Lévinas montre que l'auto-affection est en même temps une hétéro-affection. Ainsi, d'accord avec M. Henry pour affirmer qu'être soi c'est se sentir, Lévinas affirme dans le même temps qu'un tel se sentir est impossible! Mais ce qui vient ainsi menacer la certitude de soi-même n'est-il pas aussi un moyen d'échapper à une autre forme de perte de soi, qui viendrait de l'accablement du moi par la pesanteur ou la « matérialité » de l'existence? C'est pour répondre à cette question que la seconde partie de ce travail demande si l'affectivité — envisagée sur le plan de la temporalité, du langage et de la relation à autrui — doit être pensée comme immanence ou comme transcendance. This article sets out to question the notion of selfhood in Lévinas and M. Henry's thoughts, insofar as they both contend that selfhood rests on the experience of self-feeling, what M. Henry calls « affectivity ». First, I try to show that Lévinas's philosophy — especially in De l'existence à l'existant —, although often understood as one of transcendence supposedly opposed to Henry's immanence, in reality finds this transcendence in the immanence of self-feeling. But, while M. Henry opposes affectivity to sensibility, Lévinas shows that auto-affection is at the same time hetero-affection. Thus, Lévinas agrees with M. Henry in asserting that selfhood is self-feeling, but, at the same time, thinks that such self-feeling is impossible! But, isn't what thus comes to menace the certitude of oneself also a means of avoiding another kind of loss of individuality, that comes from being weighed down by the burden or the « materiality » of the existence? It is to answer this question that the second part of this article explores whether affectivity must be thought of as immanence or transcendence. (shrink)

This volume examines the nature of interpretation, strategies within interpretation, and negotiations about the adequacy of an interpretation, with special attention paid to possible roles interpretation plays in the academic study of religions. While many people engage in interpretation, it is not clear what interpretation is. Throughout the book, a number of fundamental questions posed throughout the history of hermeneutics (theory of interpretation) are addressed. What is an “interpretation”? What or who determines the meaning of a text? What helps in (...) navigating competitions or conflicts of interpretation? What is the place of interpretation in the academy, relative to explanatory sciences and productive arts? The unique approach taken to interpretation here is based on the fundamental axiom of philosophical hermeneutics—the hermeneutic priority of questioning. Through this, the author makes a case for the critical value of interpretation. The book fills a gap in pedagogical literature on interpretation, where most books focus either on historical developments of hermeneutics, on key modern hermeneutic philosophers, or on specific sacred texts such as in biblical or Quranic hermeneutics. Each chapter of this book refines a conceptual element that combines with others into a theory of interpretation useful for the classroom and in scholarship on hermeneutics. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present what I take to be a standard view of morality, and I argue that this view amounts to a paradox: the moral event or moral concern, the source of morality, ultimately leads, through moral theory, to a denial of itself. I will show how Badiou and Levinas take a way out of this and in doing so deny the possibility of anticipating the moral. Furthermore, I claim that this anticipatory moment can be introduced back (...) by means of the concept of “practical wisdom” as used in analytical virtue ethics. Finally, I argue that the Kantian notion of the sublime is structurally the same as the moral event in Badiou and Levinas, and that our view of the sublime can benefit from both Levinas’ view and the concept of “practical wisdom” as well. (shrink)

Phenomenology and ancient Greek philosophy. The title of this book, indicating these topics as its two main subjects, could give the impression that the subjects are held together by a circumstantial “and.” The title would then indicate a connection between phenomenology and a topic, ancient Greek philosophy, the way titles such as Art and Phenomenology, Phenomenology and Psychological Research, Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics do. This impression would be wrong. First, ancient Greek philosophers take pride of place in the dialogues initiated (...) by many phenomenologists with various figures from the history of philosophy. Second, this is not just because phenomenological philosophers have tended to regard ancient Greek philosophy as the revered beginning of Western thought, reflection upon which may help illuminate any topic modern human beings wish to inquire into or give it a kind of historical dignity. It is first and foremost because ancient Greek philosophy, understood as the scientific attempt to understand the world, ourselves, and our place in the world, in the phenomenological tradition is regarded as one important origin of contemporary Western philosophy and science, even if contemporary philosophy and science is also determined by a new ideal of philosophy that emerges in early modernity. Indeed, for most phenomenologists, Greek philosophy can be regarded as the roots supporting this new ideal—even if these roots are sometimes hidden from sight or forgotten. The main rationale for confronting ancient Greek philosophy phenomenologically is accordingly the attempt to bring to light in its full radicality the phenomenon “philosophy.” Unearthing philosophy as it was originally understood by Greek thinkers may, according to many phenomenologists at least, help us understand what philosophy in the full sense of the word was, has been, and may be again, but also what it has become or even degenerated into in modern times, for instance positivism. It is this way of approaching ancient Greek philosophy that we wish to concentrate on in this book, in the hope that the volume will prove instructive both to people who have an interest in ancient Greek philosophy and wish to know more about the phenomenological approach to it and to people who work within phenomenology and wish to know more about the various approaches to ancient Greek philosophy characterizing the phenomenological movement. We have therefore sought to make the introduction and the individual chapters accessible to non-experts, for instance by transliterating all Greek text, and confining quotes in other languages than English to footnotes and glosses. (shrink)

Alison Assiter has put together a work that has the potential to create an exciting and stimulating debate in Kierkegaard circles. Mostly because she portrays Kierkegaard as an idealist ontologist, that is, a philosopher of not just human nature (i.e. subjectivity), but also nature in its cosmic totality. Thus, what I find most admirable is that with Assiter we have a thinker who has the philosophical courage to suggest that the purported relationship between Schelling and Kierkegaard leads necessarily to bold (...) philosophical consequences. Since Günther Figal’s 1980 article, Schelling und Kierkegaards Freiheitsbegriff, which gave us the first clue of the Kierkegaardian connection to Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, scholars have primarily focused on reemphasizing the actual possibility of (the early) Schellingean heritage in Kierkegaard, meanwhile forgetting to ask themselves what consequences this connection might have on our interpretation of Kierkegaard’s corpus. Assiter’s book is an attempt to draw such a long needed consequence. (shrink)

En el presente escrito intentaremos mostrar cómo dos nociones fundamentales en la ética de Emmanuel Levinas, a saber, la idea de Dios y la responsabilidad, pueden comprenderse, respectivamente, como el infi nito actual y el infi nito potencial, según la distinción clásica sugerida por Aristóteles. Además, haremos ver que ambos infi nitos sí pueden existir (cosa que la metafísica clásica no admitía), siempre y cuando se comprendan desde una ética de la alteridad.

En este artículo se plantea la hipótesis interpretativa de que una lectura retrospectiva de los textos en los que Emmanuel Lévinas se refirió a la muerte, permitiría captar si sus análisis estaban ya en los primeros trabajos de su formulación ético-metafísica, en la base del pluralismo del cara-a-cara. Con el fi n de mostrar esta hipótesis se revisan las menciones a la muerte en las obras levinasianas invirtiendo la habitual cronología ascendente.

Argues for the role of personal acquaintance in both love and concern for individuals, as such. The challenge is to say what personal acquaintance is and why it matters in the way it does. These questions are addressed through the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Topics include: the ethics of aggregation, the basis of moral standing, and the value of human life.

In Alain Badiou’s most recent work, L’immanence des vérités, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once again figures peripherally but saliently. What is their specific relation in...

El propósito de este monográfi co es entablar diálogos cruzados o recuperar algunos de los diálogos que son la urdimbre del pensamiento de Levinas y Derrida. Este número polifónico ofrece la oportunidad de escuchar algunas voces con, contra, desde, por, para las cuales escribieron estos dos fi - lósofos de la alteridad. Por ello quienes lean los trabajos incluidos en este monográfi co no encontrarán artículos duales o marcados por los binomios. En cambio, se enfrentarán a posibilidades, a huellas, a (...) rostros, a deudas, a duelos, a fantasmas, a alteridades que hablan desde los márgenes con otros sobre lo otro. Hallarán diálogos cruzados sobre la alteridad. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume connects the philosophy of history to moral philosophy with a unique focus on time. Taking in a range of intellectual traditions, cultural, and geographical contexts, the volume provides a rich tapestry of approaches to time, morality, culture, and history. -/- By extending the philosophical discussion on the ethical importance of temporality, the editors disentangle some of the disciplinary tensions between analytical and hermeneutic philosophy of history, cultural theory, meta-ethical theory, and normative ethics. The ethical and existential character (...) of temporality reveals itself within a collection that resists the methodological underpinnings of any one philosophical school. The book's distinctive cross-cultural approach ensures a wide range of perspectives with contributions on life and death in Japanese philosophy, ethics and time in Maori philosophy, non-traditional temporalities and philosophical anthropology, as well as global approaches to ethics. -/- These new directions of study highlight the importance of the ethical in the temporal, inviting further points of departure in this burgeoning field. (shrink)

Levinas is almost solely studied from the perspective of phenomenology, and this is evidently quite justifiable by the fact that the philosopher claims to be Husserl’s heir, although it is very importante to consider other influences for a deeper understanding of his thought, such as talmudism and Russian literature. But, in general, an important reference remains forgotten that Levinas never fails to mention in his interviews and even in the preface to the German edition (1987) of his important book Totalité (...) et infini: Bergson’s philosophy. Our objective is to seek the elements of this approach, often mentioned but little explored, between the ethical intuitions of Levinas and Bergson. Although it is not the work Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion that Levinas likes to remember when referring to Bergson, it is what we will evoke to suggest an intuitive communication that connects the bergsonian concept of open and the levinasian concept of the infinite. Levinas takes a step beyond phenomenology when he elaborates one of his fundamental concepts, that of visage, and it is he himself who admits in the conversation with Philippe Nemo entitled Éthique et infini (1984), but we should be surprised if the most important notion of Levinas ethics, that of infinity, would reveal what is most essential in Bergson’s ethics, the sense of openness through which unlimited, in other words, unconditional, responsibility is announced? (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an account of the structural differences, neglected in the literature, between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Emmanuel Levinas, showing how Bonhoeffer’s account of persons and responsibility is differentiated through creation, fall, and redemption, whereas Levinas’s account of ethical selfhood offers itself as a kind of transcendental account of persons in which the self is structured by its encounter with the other which commands responsibility. This difference (situationally differentiated vs. transcendental) plays out in two ways – the role (...) of the will in ethical selfhood and the identity of the primal governing agent in the encounter with others. Bonhoeffer’s account, through its differentiation into different modes of existence, allows for the possibility of different stages and modes of the encounter with the other, and thus allows for the incorporation of one model of encounter at one stage, and another model at a different stage. As a consequence, Bonhoeffer’s account includes and develops upon the kind of demand-based account Levinas offers. This can serve as an advantage over Levinas’s model insofar as it provides a ‘multi-modal’ framework to absorb other views into one’s own in a way that a transcendentally conceived framework of selfhood does not. (shrink)

Book review on Ondřej Sikora – Jakub Sirovátka (vyd.) Lévinas v konfrontaci. Praha (Oikúmené) 2019, 279 str.

El pensamiento de E. Levinas, inserto en la corriente de la filosofía dialógica, ha dado un lugar prioritario a la cuestión antropológica del “otro”. Cabría preguntarse cuál es, sin embargo, el papel de la realidad social en el marco de su reflexión. La sociedad aparece en la obra de Levinas como un “tercero” al que se le asignan unas características propias, entre las que la aspiración a la justicia se erige un referente fundamental. El concepto mismo de justicia, en el (...) que se entrecruzan, a juicio del autor, raíces bíblicas y elementos del pensamiento filosófico occidental, adquiere una triple componente: social, política y económica, que no pierde de vista el principio vertebrador del otro, quien se ofrece vitalmente, de un modo vulnerable, demandando, de este modo, una acogida responsable. (shrink)

This article defends Cavell and Levinas’ view that anti-skeptical arguments cannot attain universal assent. In the first half of the article, I argue that Conant’s reading of Cavell is mistaken in two respects: he ignores Cavell’s inheritance of Kant as well as the differences Cavell emphasizes between external world and other minds skepticism. In the second half of the paper, I examine affinities between Cavell and Levinas’ thought, viz., acknowledging the facticity of the other and their remarks on skepticism. I (...) close the paper by noting three metaphysical and ethical truths that arise from Cavell’s way with skepticism. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay develops a dialogue between Zhu Xi's thirteenth-century Neo-Confucian thought and Levinas' twentieth-century Western philosophy, around the notion of interrelatedness between individuals, between self and other. Despite the fact that Zhu Xi and Levinas belong to diff erent cultural universes and to diff erent philosophical spiritualities, and lived in diff erent historical times, they share the same interest in exploring, interpreting, and building interrelatedness, and therefore in ethics and ethical relationships. Through an intertextual and hermeneutical approach, the essay builds (...) a dialogue between diff erent cultural presuppositions underlying the essence of ethics and of ethical relationship: otherness and sameness. This dialogue allows one to become aware of the existence of transcultural concepts such as interrelatedness, and of their diff erent, cross-cultural meanings (e.g., interrelatedness is grounded in "sameness" in Zhu Xi's Confucian context and in "otherness" in Levinas' thought). (shrink)

This article surveys the numerous philosophical themes Levinas attributes to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Detailed discussions are provided of the face as the temptation to commit violence and its prohibition, of the there is as the impossibility of an exit from existence, of the foundational role of con­science in ethics, and of the nature of the tragic hero who seeks to postpone the inevitability of death. I argue that it is only by treating the face as in some sense provoking violence can (...) we hope to understand how the character Macbeth finds it possible to murder Duncan while looking him in the face. This reading requires us to see him as ethically ambivalent, as one might expect from a play in which “nothing is but what is not.” The essay concludes with a brief reflection on why Macbeth manages to evoke our pity, even though we know him to be a murderer. (shrink)

At a time when the practice of medicine is subject to technical and biopolitical imperatives that give rise to defensive bioethics, it is essential to revitalize the ethical dimensions of care at the very heart of the clinic, in order to give new meaning to the moral responsibility that inhabits it. This contribution seeks to meet this challenge by drawing on the ethical resources of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In Levinas’ view, ethical responsibility is the response to the injunction, (...) the interpellation, of the other’s face, and humaneness is conceived entangled in the other’s face. Against this background, I suggest that Levinas’ philosophical insight constitutes a turning point from a traditional to a new conception of responsibility that may bear great significance to a renewed understanding of an hermeneutics and an ethics of care. By drawing on this aspect of Levinas’ thought, I would like to reveal the ethical core of an ethics of clinical care that shapes a new insight on medical judgment. (shrink)

Jeffrey Bloechl traces the evolution of Levinas's thought to argue that his conception of God is dependent on his existential phenomenology.

This article aims to present how the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas understands the issues of suffering and evil in the world, hardships frequently considered as obstacles to the belief in God. Breaking away from the logic of theodicies, the French-Lithuanian philosopher developed original and instigating perspectives on these themes, placing them in an eminently ethical domain. It concerns an ethic that escapes reciprocity, in a context of asymmetry, with the granting of absolute priority to the other man. Such reflections are particularly (...) relevant in the dramatic scenario established by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has given rise to suffering, death, and several uncertainties, among which the narrative of God. The new coronavirus has sparked a crisis of global dimensions, which raises the need for a new civilizational paradigm, prioritizing principles such as cooperation, human solidarity and ethical responsibility towards others, a horizon in which Lévinas' conceptions are included. (shrink)

This paper aims to portray the human being as spirit, in dialogue with Levinas’ first philosophy. The relation between time and eternity is addressed in the work of both Kierkegaard and Levinas. However, in Kierkegaard’s notion of spirit there lies a discernible further development of the relation between the subject and that which transcends it. In Kierkegaard’s authorship, the absolute exteriority of the eternal does not break or suspend the finite structure of the subject. Contrary to Levinas’ critique of the (...) Danish philosopher, the possibility of a life is opened in which neither the external world nor the relation with the others is disdained. (shrink)