Ethics of Responsibility and Ambiguity of Politics in Levinas’s Philosophy

Problemos 97:61-74 (2020)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The destruction of man in the Shoah or Holocaust did not mean that Levinas argues in favor of turning away from the socio-historical reality to cultivate his own little garden. The deepest truth of subjectivity can be found in an alterity that calls for a socio-political responsibility. The political implications are rooted in different layers of Levinas’s thought. In his Talmudic comments, Levinas questions the reality of war as the truth of politics. But his explorations of subjectivity, ethical relationality and society allow to understand different political options such as contract theory, liberation philosophy and human rights and the necessity of building a just society. Paradoxically, a just and equitable society ignores the uniqueness of the unique other. While organized responsibility is necessary, it introduces a new form of violence. In this article, we bring together the different layers in Levinas’s political vision and we explore its limits. A fundamental question is whether Levinas’s vision of politics is based on ethics or whether his ethics is a critique of politics.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 93,590

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-04-28

Downloads
18 (#201,463)

6 months
4 (#1,635,958)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Critique of Pure Reason.I. Kant - 1787/1998 - Philosophy 59 (230):555-557.
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence.Emmanuel Levinas & Alphonso Lingis - 1981 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (4):245-246.
Of God Who Comes to Mind.Emmanuel Levinas - 1998 - Stanford University Press.
Philosophy of Liberation.Enrique Dussel - 1988 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 23 (1):50-50.
Goodness without Witnesses: Vasily Grossman and Emmanuel Levinas.Luc Anckaert - 2020 - In Michael Fagenblat & Arthur Cools (eds.), Levinas and Literature: New Directions. De Gruyter. pp. 223-238.

View all 6 references / Add more references