_Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy’s most pressing issues._.

It is commonly believed that considering nature different from us, human beings (qua rational, cultural, religious and social actors), is detrimental to our engagement for the preservation of nature. An obvious example is animal rights, a deep concern for all living beings, including non-human living creatures, which is understandable only if we approach nature, without fearing it, as something which should remain outside of our true home. “Walking with the earth” aims at questioning any similar preconceptions in the wide sense, (...) including allegoric-poetic contributions. We invited 14 authors from 4 continents to express all sorts of ways of saying why caring is so important, why togetherness, being-with each others, as a spiritual but also embodied ethics is important in a divided world. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most elaborately discussed moral philosophers of recent decades, and his philosophy has many adherents. I believe, however, that the scholarly literature on his work...

ABSTRACT In reference to the article by Hanan Alexander ‘Education in nonviolence’, the text takes up the issue of reading Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic texts for the philosophy of education. It intends to positively answer the question about the value and potential of such inspiration, focusing on concepts from two of Levinas’s Talmudic readings. The first part of the text is devoted to the characteristics of the intellectual output of the thinker. The second part analyses and discusses Alexander’s commentary on one (...) of Levinas’s Talmudic readings, ‘Toward the Other’. Alexander aims to show the specificity of the idea of education in nonviolence, heavily indebted to the Jewish tradition and thought. The third part of the text is an extension of Alexander’s comment, focuses on another Talmudic reading by Levinas, ‘Cities of Refuge’, and aims to outline the philosophical underpinnings of the idea of the pedagogy of asylum. (shrink)

The kind of phenomenology that can be useful to theology will be a hermeneutical phenomenology, one that takes us beyond the Cartesian/Husserlian ideal of presuppositionless intuition. It will also be a phenomenology of inverse intentionality, one in which the constituting subject is constituted by the look and the voice of another. In light of these suggestions, the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion is defended against three critiques, namely that it compromises the boundary between phenomenology and theology, that the theology it serves (...) is a bad one to boot, and that it has an inadequate account of the subject. At the heart of this defense is Marion's clear distinction between phenomenology as a description of possible experience, and theology as the claim that a certain kind of experience, namely revelation or epiphany, is not merely actual but veridical. Phenomenology says, If revelation occurs it will be in the form of a saturated phenomenon. Theology says, for example, the burning bush was an epiphany, or Jesus Christ is a revelation. The attentive reader should have no trouble distinguishing Marion's phenomenological analyses, which should be persuasive to believer and unbeliever alike, from his theological claims. Marion's account of the subject falls under the heading of inverse intentionality, and there are hints that vision is aufgehoben in the voice. The seer is first of all the one seen, but above all the one addressed, called forth into response-able being. (shrink)

The kind of phenomenology that can be useful to theology will be a hermeneutical phenomenology, one that takes us beyond the Cartesian/Husserlian ideal of presuppositionless intuition. It will also be a phenomenology of inverse intentionality, one in which the constituting subject is constituted by the look and the voice of another. In light of these suggestions, the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion is defended against three critiques, namely that it compromises the boundary between phenomenology and theology, that the theology it serves (...) is a bad one to boot, and that it has an inadequate account of the subject. At the heart of this defense is Marion's clear distinction between phenomenology as a description of possible experience, and theology as the claim that a certain kind of experience, namely revelation or epiphany, is not merely actual but veridical. Phenomenology says, If revelation occurs it will be in the form of a saturated phenomenon. Theology says, for example, the burning bush was an epiphany, or Jesus Christ is a revelation. The attentive reader should have no trouble distinguishing Marion's phenomenological analyses, which should be persuasive to believer and unbeliever alike, from his theological claims. Marion's account of the subject falls under the heading of inverse intentionality, and there are hints that vision is aufgehoben in the voice. The seer is first of all the one seen, but above all the one addressed, called forth into response-able being. (shrink)

This paper investigates how the introduction of AI to decision making increases moral distance and recommends the ethics of care to augment the ethical examination of AI decision making. With AI decision making, face-to-face interactions are minimized, and decisions are part of a more opaque process that humans do not always understand. Within decision-making research, the concept of moral distance is used to explain why individuals behave unethically towards those who are not seen. Moral distance abstracts those who are impacted (...) by the decision and leads to less ethical decisions. The goal of this paper is to identify and analyze the moral distance created by AI through both proximity distance (in space, time, and culture) and bureaucratic distance (derived from hierarchy, complex processes, and principlism). We then propose the ethics of care as a moral framework to analyze the moral implications of AI. The ethics of care brings to the forefront circumstances and context, interdependence, and vulnerability in analyzing algorithmic decision making. (shrink)

Both Kant and Levinas state that traditional ontology is a type of philosophy that illegitimately forces the structure of human reason onto other beings, thus making the subject the center and origin of all meaning. Kant’s critique of the ontology of his scholastic predecessors is well known. For Levinas, however, it does not suffice. He rejects what we could call an ‘existential ontology’: a self-centered way of living as a whole, of which all philosophical ontology is but a branch. Alternatively, (...) he presents an ethical way of living centered on ‘the Other’. Kant also, however, eventually turns to ethics to uncover a more fundamental domain of meaning. Hence, both thinkers ultimately agree about the primacy of ethics over theory. Despite this concurrence, Levinas nevertheless criticizes all aspects of Kant’s turn towards ethics: his reason for making this turn, the kind of critique that he applies to this domain, and the outcome thereof. These three points reflect Levinas’ more general critique t.. (shrink)

While it is impossible to transfigurephilosophical and Judaic thought of EmmanuelLevinas into a moral agenda for education orthe programmatic regularities of a pedagogicalmethodology, this paper argues for theimportance of his work for re-openingeducational questions. These questions engagethe problem of what it could mean to livehistorically, to live within an uprightattentiveness to traces of those who haveinhabited times and places other than one'sown. In this sense, I address the problem ofremembrance as a question of and for history,as a force of inhabitation, (...) as an inheritance weare obligated to live within, that intertwineswith our sense of limits and possibilities,hopes and fears, identities and distinctions.Substantively, this problem is manifest in howone attends to the experiences of others: howone reads, how one views, and how one listens,always historically specific normalizedpractices that in any given epoch are ingrainedin what it means to live in consort withothers, to live as though the lives of otherpeople mattered. The paper seeks to display thefecundity of the thought of Levinas forre-thinking such issues. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present paper examines the Eckhartian motives in Derrida's critique of Levinas’ concept of the “Other”. The focus is put on the Husserlian concept of alter ego that is at the core of the debate between Levinas and Derrida. Against Levinas, Derrida argues that alter is not an epithet that expresses a mere accidental modification of the ego, but an indicator of radical exteriority. Interestingly enough, this position is virtually identical with Meister Eckhart's interpretation of the famous proposition from Exodus (...) 3:14 “I am who I am”. Eckhart claims that the pronoun ego denotes the absolutely simple substance of the uncreated intellect, which can, by definition, never receive any accidental determination whatsoever. The reduplication of the “I am” is by no means tautological, but expresses the intra-divine dynamic of the Father who engenders the Son as his perfect equal and alter ego. This transcendental conception of egoity also governs the relationships between human beings: the ethical encou.. (shrink)

There are resources in Heidegger’s work for identifying and mitigating pervasive modes of misrecognition that are characteristic of modern society, and, by identifying them, we become capable of attending to “supplementary” aspects of authenticity: terms of identity should apply to all in the same way, and, because these terms are a product of all, they are the responsibility of each individual. The first section analyses Being-guilty, Dasein-with, and Being-with to emphasise Dasein’s dependence on others, arguing that the dynamic of recognition (...) characteristic of Dasein implies a responsibility for recognising the other adequately. The second identifies common modes of misrecognition, arguing that these modes imply a shared responsibility for the contexts of recognition in which we participate. The third turns to Sartre’s work, arguing that our interpersonal relations offer resources for correcting our inadequate ways of recognizing one another and for recognizing the fundamental place of communication in the realization of human freedom. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Levinas has often been accused of having little or no room for the maternal in his writing, his rhetoric nonetheless applies maternal tendencies that complicate his ethical st...

While Levinas famously claims that ethics precedes ontology and emanates from the concrete experience of the other's face, it is often forgotten that Deleuze also discusses the face in numerous writings. The purpose of this paper is to briefly outline Levinas's arguments regarding the constitution of the face to chart its ethical importance, before engaging with Deleuze's critique of Levinas's position. I show that, by distinguishing between two systems of signification – the head-body system and the face system – Deleuze (...) agrees with Levinas that the face is an important signifier delineating the other, but destructs the notion of face to show that it: is more complex and multi-dimensional than Levinas realizes; emanates from a specific semiotic relationship; and emanates from specific socio-historical circumstances. Showing the face is a semiotic construct based in and emanating from a specific socio-historical configuration allows Deleuze not only to conclude that the face is related to politics not ethics as Levinas claims, but also to claim that it entails the inhuman in the human. This clarifies the nature of the face in Deleuze, offers a critique of Levinas's influential thinking on ethics, brings us to a discussion of the relationship between ethics and politics and reveals what Deleuze takes the political to entail. (shrink)

This contribution shows how the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has been confronted autobiographically with National-Socialism (1933-1945) and how his personal experience and the experience of the Jewish people under Hitlerism were translated in his philosophical understanding of ‘being’ as ‘il y a’ (in English: ‘there is’). The Holocaust provides a unique negative point of entry to understand Levinas’ ontological category which is as such not understandable since in the il y a, there is no longer a subject that stands before (...) the objectivity of reality. On the contrary, the il y a is exactly the category that expresses a situation where the subject itself has no longer the ‘right’ to exist as such but still does not stop to exist. This violence of being is exactly what Hitlerism wanted to do in creating the Holocaust and submitting the Jewish people to it. This makes understandable how the whole philosophy of Levinas is an effort to overcome the il y a through a moral answer to the Holocaust. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of big data practices for theories about the surveilled subject who, analysed from afar, is still gazed upon, although not directly watched as with previous surveillance systems. We propose this surveilled subject be viewed through a lens of proximity rather than interactivity, to highlight the normative issues arising within digitally mediated relationships. We interpret the ontological proximity between subjects, data flows and big data surveillance through Merleau-Ponty’s ideas combined with Levinas’ approach to ethical proximity and (...) Coeckelberg’s work on proximity in the digital age. This leads us to highlight how competing normativities, and normative dilemmas in these proximal spaces, manipulate the surveilled subject’s embodied practices to lead the embodied individual towards experiencing them in a local sense. We explore when and how the subject notices these big data practices and then interprets them through translating their experiences into courses of action, inaction or acquiescence. (shrink)

Robotics is currently not only a cutting-edge research area, but is potentially disruptive to all domains of our lives—for better and worse. While legislation is struggling to keep pace with the development of these new artifacts, our intellectual limitations and physical laws seem to present the only hard demarcation lines, when it comes to state-of-the-art R&D. To better understand the possible implications, the paper at hand critically investigates underlying processes and structures of robotics in the context of Heidegger’s and Nishitani’s (...) accounts of science and technology. Furthermore, the analysis draws on Bauman’s theory of modernity in an attempt to assess the potential risk of large-scale robot integration. The paper will highlight undergirding mechanisms and severe challenges imposed upon our socio-cultural lifeworlds by massive robotic integration. Admittedly, presenting a mainly melancholic account, it will, however, also explore the possibility of robotics forcing us to reassess our position and to solve problems, which we seem unable to tackle without facing existential crises. (shrink)

This paper works with Levinasian thought to ask how principles of responsibility can be engaged for the twenty-first century crisis of climate destabilization, and other matters of injustice and exploitation. A case is made for extending an ethics of responsibility from a human-centered view to include humans as interdependent with nature. After a selective review of responsibility as inaugurating an ontology of otherwise-than-being, consideration is given to the phenomenology of the face-to-face relation and to notions of a teaching relation, to (...) knowledge and to Levinas’ notion of justice, in line with the philosophical and educational interests of this journal. The prospect of society constituted on responsibility is brought to life in a brief reference to Māori society and indigenous thought. An interpretation of quantum theory is also introduced because of its analogies with the inter-related world view of indigenous thought. These all point to relationality which antecedes the ontology of being. While much is made of Levinas’ work on the face, this paper argues that it is in principles of ethics that break with totality, and Levinas’ notions of transcendence and infinity rather than the face per se that enable us to broaden the scope of reference for Levinasian ethics. Levinasian ethics question the stronghold of liberal humanistic goals in educational vision, and open a horizon of the shared destiny of humans and nature—an ‘eco-pedagogy.’ The paper draws these threads together to consider their relevance to education for sustainability. (shrink)

It does not seem terribly unfair to say that studies of both rhetoric and dialogue have tended, by and large, to pass over listening in favor of speaking. In scholarly as well as quotidian parlance, it would appear that both rhetoric and dialogue are principally concerned with speech, banishing listening to the silent subservience of rhetoric's other. Whichever way it is glossed—as rhetoric, dialogue, language, or argumentation—the Western conception of logos emphasizes speaking at the expense of listening. And the problem (...) with conceiving of logos in terms of speech and speaking is not only that it ignores the importance of listening but also that it obscures how listening makes the ethical response possible. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this article examines the ethical exigency of the face and its relation to primordial discourse in order to disclose the otherwise hidden ethical significance of listening and its vocation as a form of co-constitutive communicative action that can “listen persons to speech.”. (shrink)

The current heated debate on the deteriorating status of the university raises a range of pertinent questions, including: What role can the humanities play in culture today in the face of the crisis of higher education? To answer this question, the authors begin by problematizing the relationship between culture, the humanities, and education. In the second part of the paper, they examine the changing role of the humanities in conjunction with the understandings of culture, and outline three salient ways in (...) which culture is conceived of today. Subsequently, they focus on the loss of the dominant status that culture suffered when everyday life was discovered in modernity. In the third part, they argue that everyday life, or rather social representations of everyday life and its practices, are currently becoming the chief criterion for assessing culture, the humanities, and education. However, everyday life remains complex both in theoretical conceptualizations and in research observations. For example, everyday life harbors a range of risks and anxieties which are veiled by its own obviousness and reinforced by socialization. The authors conclude that, given this, everyday life in democratic societies calls for the work of understanding, support, affirmation, and criticism, in which the humanities can retain their superior status. In the fourth part, the authors discuss non-consensual democracy, critical community, and the pedagogy of asylum as the forms of organization and action that promote an auspicious interconnection of culture, the humanities, and education. (shrink)

Disability has been a topic of heightened philosophical interest in the last 30 years. Disability theory has enriched a broad range of sub-specializations in philosophy. The call for papers for this issue welcomed papers addressing questions on normalcy, medical ethics, public health, philosophy of education, aesthetics, philosophy of sport, philosophy of religion, and theories of knowledge. This issue of Essays in Philosophy includes nine essays that approach the philosophy of disability in three distinct ways: The first set of three essays (...) provide a careful analysis of John Rawls, and the application of his work in ethics and justice to societies in which persons with disabilities, especially cognitive disabilities, can take active part in the processes of civil society. The second set of three essays branch out into continental philosophy, and are especially engaged with issues of community membership, communication, translation, and hermeneutics. The third set of three essays address disability specifically through the arts and aesthetics; asking questions on the portrayal of disabled persons in the arts and its implications for normalcy, sexuality, beauty, and the sublime. (shrink)

The article stages the beginning of a virtual conversation between Levinas’s ‘ethics as first philosophy’ and Adorno’s negative dialectic. Part I frames the problem: for both thinkers the task of critique depends on some access to a ‘fixed point’ for transcendence (Levinas) or a ‘standpoint removed’ from the domain of existence (Adorno). Part II traces the deep, even essential, connection both perceive between knowledge and violence, a link which brings the possibility of critique even more stringently into question. A standpoint (...) removed must be both less and more than knowledge. Part III sketches Adorno’s response to this dilemma in the tracing of a negative dialectic, a thinking that is ‘the morality of thought’, and one that turns traditional dialectics inside-out. Negative dialectic seems to meet Levinas’s ethical criteria for critique. Part IV outlines Levinas’s response: the fixed point for critique is in the proximity and sensibility of the ethical relation that lies behind all formal alterity and therefore behind all ontology and all cognition, whether pre-dialectical, dialectical, or post-dialectical. Yet the ethical relation cannot be said except in terms virtually dependent on negative dialectic. Part V examines a potential Levinasian criticism of Adorno and a potential Adornian criticism of Levinas. The fulfillment of the ambition of each would require him to adopt the standpoint of the other. And this may be possible in that thinking along with each demands that one think not only of multiple perspectives but with them. (shrink)

There is a rich tradition of inquiry in consumer research into how collective consumption manifests in various forms and contexts. While this literature has shown how group cohesion prescribes ethical and moral positions, our study explores how ethicality can arise from consumers and their relations in a more emergent fashion. To do so, we present a Levinasian perspective on consumer ethics through a focus on Restaurant Day, a global food carnival that is organized by consumers themselves. Our ethnographic findings highlight (...) a non-individualistic way of approaching ethical subjectivity that translates into acts of catering to the needs of other people and the subversion of extant legislation by foregrounding personal responsibility. These findings show that while consumer gatherings provide participants a license to temporarily subvert existing roles, they also allow the possibility of ethical autonomy when the mundane rules of city life are renegotiated. These sensibilities also create ‘ethical surplus’, which is an affective excess of togetherness. In the Levinasian register, Restaurant Day thus acts as an inarticulable ‘remainder’—a trace of the possibility of being able to live otherwise alongside one another in city contexts. (shrink)

This paper characterizes a present institutionalizedunwillingness of both the Israeli and Palestinian educationalsystems to acknowledge each other's suffering because of the presenceof what the author terms `the otherness of the other.' This isdone largely through hegemonic control of memory of genocidesendured by both and through limiting constructions of the self.Coming to terms with `each other' paves the way for ahumanistic-oriented counter-education, one based in mutualacknowledgment and open dialogue.

In this article, the concept of inclusivity in the Old Testament is investigated and the theology of 'Otherness' is discussed broadly. Various authors discuss the 'Otherness' in biblical Israel. These views are critiqued and a conclusion is reached that an inclusive reading in the Old Testament, specifically of the known exclusive texts in the Hebrew Bible, is a possibility. To argue for inclusivity in the Old Testament, a view of hospitality is considered and a literary review of inclusive texts is (...) conducted, namely the Books of Ruth, Jonah, Ecclesiastes, Esther and some Deuterocanonical texts. (shrink)

The modern notion of the subject as constant self-presence that conditions the truthful appearance of phenomena is brought under sustained critical scrutiny by Heidegger. More than critical scrutiny, Heidegger offered a positive sketch of what is other than the subject, Dasein. Understanding the human being as openness for the circulation and preservation of the meaning of what-is as such is posed as the negation of the self-contained closure and interiority that subjectivity is. Levinas sees materialism and the loss of interiority (...) and freedom in Heidegger’s project, inclining more towards an ethics of things rather than persons. However, Levinas’s criticisms themselves are not free of the modern predilection for the human, albeit in a fresh and rich way. Conversely, it can be argued that that being which is open to the world of things and people still has a profound interior dimension because it is in each case mine. The Heideggerian notion of human agency and freedom may be appropriated as a possible response to technological nihilism and modern subjectivism. (shrink)

This paper compares Heidegger’s “dasein-centric” existential hermeneutic to Levinas’s primacy of the Other and the importance the latter places on the ethical relationship. Invoking the concepts of totality and infinity, the paper discusses the ways in which one encounters the Other and how signification arises from the ethical relationship. This is followed by a discussion of how Levinas’s ethics might influence existential phenomenological research methodology, pointing to the ethical demands described by Levinas as seeming to have priority over the praxis (...) of research insofar as the Other calls us beyond the methodological framework. Finally, the paper considers the extent to which the ethical demands of Levinas’s phenomenology are met by the special place of the research participant and the attitude of empathic presence prescribed within the Heideggerian framework. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 10, Edition 2, October 2010: 11-22. (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)

Recent attempts by American theorists to produce a radical politics, characterized by the effort to translate the insights of Continental philosophy into a political register, remain trapped in that which they purport to transcend: the metaphysics of subjectivity. In their essential determinations, the works of William Connolly, Stephen White, Richard Ashley, etc. remain firmly anchored in a traditional liberal schema. The reason for this is that while these efforts have sought to de-center political identity by exposing its relational character they (...) have not re-thought 'rela tionality' itself. Our attempt to develop the more profound political impli cations of 'relationality' unfolds through a synthetic explication of Martin Heidegger's analysis of language, Jacques Derrida's logic of the gift, and Emmanuel Levinas' consideration of the Other. The emergent thematic of asymmetrical relationality reconfigures liberalism and provides for a rethinking of the structure of welfare. (shrink)

It is by way of the call that one is enabled to wake up to responsibility. What is the illocutionary mood of the ‘call’ of conscience, though? Is this transcendental enabler of responsibility an imposing demand or an invitational question? Both Levinas and Heidegger emphasize the impositional character of the call in conscience. The call seems to be the very essence of imperatives. I develop an apology for questioning by way of appeal to crumbs scattered throughout Jewish traditions as well (...) as throughout the works of Levinas and Heidegger. Perhaps we are invited to be rather than told to be. (shrink)

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)

This paper offers a reading of passages in Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures in which Heidegger describes love as a feeling which grants an essential vision. I contend that by invoking this language of vision while simultaneously contrasting love with infatuation, Heidegger is implicitly attempting to situate love within his category of fundamental attunements. While Heidegger does not explicitly follow this thought through, I argue that doing so leads to a problem—namely, how can love be a fundamental attunement if such attunements are (...) necessarily objectless? I suggest we can see a response to this problem in Heidegger’s treatment of Plato’s Phaedrus within the same lecture course. I conclude by claiming that while Heidegger attempts to follow Plato in arguing that love is most properly directed towards Being, love nonetheless poses a challenge to Heidegger’s category of fundamental attunements which also strikes at the heart of his claim that ontology is first philosophy. (shrink)

But my real cat is not Alice’s little cat … because I am certainly not about to conclude hurriedly, upon waking, as Alice did, that one cannot speak with a cat on the pretext that it doesn’t reply or that it always replies the same thing. Everything that I am about to entrust to you no doubt comes back to asking you to respond to me, you, to me, reply to me concerning what it is to respond. If you can. (...) The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish the response from a reaction.A response that does not respond to a question is a response that is not the solution to a problem or the .. (shrink)

The unusual lacuna which runs between the philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinas and the psychoanalytical treatises of Jacques Lacan is one of the most unusual in the history of 20th century thought. Despite the numerous interests, influences, and friends the two shared, no evidence exists to suggest that they ever met or encountered one another’s work. This alluring gap has inspired explanations by a few and compensation by others. But in all of these approaches to what has been called one (...) of the most famous “missed connections,” of the 20th century, the most powerful connection has yet to be explored: the respective attempt in each to carve out a post-Heideggerian account of subjectivity. The goal of this paper will be to compare and contrast Levinas and Lacan’s respective accounts of subjectivity to better illuminate each thinkers attempt to affirm the power of the Heideggerian critique while preserving some integrity to the idea of subjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to bring together (at least) two very different debates: one on justice, mercy and particularity, the other on the play of exclusionary reasons. My aim is to show how the discussion of the uneasy co-existence of justice and mercy pivots on the question of particularity. And, secondly, that the debate on exclusionary reasons can show us why law may fail to do justice in this context.

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)

It is remarkable how much we can understand about an environmental problem at a mere glance. By means of a glance - at once quick and comprehensive - we can detect that something is going wrong in a given environmental circumstance, and we can even begin to suspect what needs to be done to rectify the situation. In this paper I explore the unsuspected power of the glance in environmental thought and practice, drawing special lessons for an ethics of the (...) environment. Specific examples are analyzed, and authors as diverse as John Dewey and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are invoked in an effort to develop a coherent vision of how the human glance helps to locate and remedy environmental crises. (shrink)

In this lyrical essay, I attempt to unravel the complexity behind new modes of HIV prevention and the rise of segregation among people of different antibody status in queer communities. In particular, I question the ease with which disclosure of HIV status is equated with safe sex. Because disclosure often reproduces the power dynamics of confession, I try to imagine an ethics of reciprocity in bearing witness. The essay is perforated by poetic fragments, the way all bodies are perforated, infected (...) or not. (shrink)

Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism. -/- The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Sparrow argues that the phenomenologists have not gone (...) far enough, however. Alongside close readings of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, he digs into an array of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in search of the resources needed to rebuild the concept of sensation after phenomenology. He begins to assemble a speculative aesthetics that is at once a realist theory of sensation and a philosophy of embodiment that breaks the form of the ‘lived’ body. Maintaining that the body is fundamentally plastic and that corporeal identity is constituted by a conspiracy of sensations, he pursues the question of how the body fits into/fails to fit into its aesthetic environment and what must be done to increase the body’s power to act and exist. (shrink)

In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...) consensual sex suggest that consent is insufficient to ground responsibility; a more fundamental orientation toward the value of sexual agency provides a better foundation for sexual ethics. Using feminist critical theory, phenomenology, and black feminist thought, this dissertation develops a socially situated and relational notion of sexual agency and diagnoses how such agency is neglected in prevailing discussions of consent in moral philosophy and legal theory. I argue that the ethical question of responsibility to another in a sexual encounter—apart from juridical considerations—should be reframed around the value of each person’s socially situated practices of agency. Preceding and extending beyond the obligation to gain valid consent for an action, responsibility demands adapting one’s intentions and behaviors in response to the wider range of another’s communicative expressions of agency. However, communicative expressions can be ambiguous or overdetermined by social context and cultural norms; they often offer only provisional traces of agency. To address this inherent uncertainty in intimacy, I propose drawing on insights from Emmanuel Levinas about the dynamic, open-ended nature of relationality, responsibility, and communication. Responsibility toward another does not depend on securing certainty about their “yes” or “no,” but requires responding continuously under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, adapting behaviors and intentions to make room for another’s agency despite its opacity. (shrink)

This article takes a close look at the discussion of singularity in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural with the aim to comment on subject-object dichotomy and create a new context for its relationship with resistance. The philosophy of singularity is critical of humanism and the individualist model of subjectivity it advocates. By placing a challenging scenario of antihumanism against the humanist sense of responsibility, the philosophy of singularity questions whether it is possible to do philosophy without saying (...) ‘I’. This antihumanist stance, which replaces the ‘I’/‘other’ differentiation with Nancy’s ‘the other of another,’ chooses to strengthen the link between ontology and resistance in the notion of coexistence; beyond traditional hypotheses on immanence and transcendence. To discuss the merits and limits of this coexistence, the article digs under the notion of individualistic subjectivity and proceeds to ground Nancy’s ‘ekstasis’ on the Freudian theory of drives. Against this theoretical background, the values of modesty and responsibility come to formulate an alternative moral consciousness, which no longer relies on the humanist jargon to work toward the common ground between 'I' and 'we'. (shrink)