Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger

Tina Chanter

Published by Stanford University Press 2001

Time, Death, and the Feminine

Levinas with Heidegger

Tina Chanter

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503618824

Overview
Contents

About this book

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. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the ecstases (past, present, and future) of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. 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.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	xvii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter one. Ontological Difference, Sexual Difference, and Time Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	37
Chapter two. Heidegger and Feminism: Bodies, Others, Temporality Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
Chapter three. Heidegger’s Critique of Metaphysical Presence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
Chapter four. The Temporality of Saying: Politics Beyond the Ontological Difference Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
Chapter five. Giving Time and Death: Levinas, Heidegger, and the Trauma of the Gift Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	170
Chapter six. Impossible Possibility: Thinking Ethics After Levinas with Rosenzweig and Heidegger in the Wake of the Shoah Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Chapter seven. A Mourning of Philosophy: Levinas’s Legacy as Traumatic Response Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
Chapter eight. The Betrayal of Philosophy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	224
Conclusion: The Lapse of Time and the Feminine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263

Language: English
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 320

eBook

Published: January 21, 2022
ISBN: 9781503618824