Emmanuel Levinas (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

Emmanuel Levinas (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

Seán Hand

Language: English

Pages: 160

ISBN: 0415402751

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Best known for his theories of ethics and responsibility, Emmanuel Levinas was one of the most profound and influential thinkers of the last century.  In this clear, accessible guide, Seán Hand examines why Levinas is increasingly fundamental to the study of literature and culture today.  Exploring the intellectual and social contexts of his work and the events that shaped it, Hand considers:

    • the influence of phenomenology and Judaism on Levinas’s thought

    • key concepts such as the ‘face’, the ‘other’, ethical consciousness and responsibility

    • Levinas’s work on aesthetics

    • the relationship of philosophy and religion in his writings

    • the interaction of his work with historical discussions

    • his often complex relationships with other theorists and theories

Emmanuel Levinas’s unique contribution to theory set an exemplary standard for all subsequent thought.  This outstanding guide to his work will prove invaluable to scholars and students across a wide range of disciplines - from philosophy and literary criticism through to international relations and the creative arts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

philosophical language and structure, and so to bring thought perhaps into the unmasterable domain of devotion. The force of this particular saying is therefore what Levinas now examines. THE SAID AND THE SAYING One of the key messages and lessons of Otherwise than Being has to do with the actual ethical force of saying. Levinas here comes close to paraphrasing Derrida's critique of Totality and Infinity regarding the subjugation of saying as a gesture to the finality and immobility of the

Given what he takes proximity to be, his own philosophical language cannot remain just within a socially comfortable realm, but rather has to generate its own de-thematization. Obsession, then, necessarily produces instances of Levinas obsessively voicing obsession, as when he writes, for example: ‘prior to all reflection, prior to every positing, an indebtedness before any loan, not assumed, anarchical, subjectivity of a bottomless passivity, made out of assignation, like the echo of a sound

precise in his focus on areas of potential shortcoming. Taking our cue in particular now from the way in which Derrida's closing point isolates how the artistic potential of language and representation can encapsulate Levinasian ethics while indicating an important limit-point in Levinas, it is to Levinas's views on the artwork that we can now turn our attention. SUMMARY The second of Levinas's two major philosophical works, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, recognizes limits still

several points. The best-known (and in terms of stern moralizing, arguably the worst) concrete example of this influence is Levinas's uncompromising assertion of the primacy of philosophical criticism in ‘Reality and its Shadow’. First published in 1948 in the existentialist journal Les Temps Modernes, this essay was extraordinarily prefaced there by a riposte representing the views of the journal's editorial committee. This preface points out sharply how Levinas omits (or perhaps ignores) what

Auschwitz, since murder and evil, even if in the form of social injustice and exploitation, are always present. His response now, in terms again reminiscent of the philosophy, involves recognizing how the text is presenting him with ‘a call to man's infinite responsibility’ (NTR 193). He finally considers more briefly the fourth and fifth instances of baraita, before observing in closing how the text itself reconciles the bringing-together of Halakhah and Aggadah in its figure of a

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