These essays provoke new responses to the work of the eminent French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas through an analysis of how the problematics of reading, deconstruction, feminism, and psychotherapy complicate and deepen Levinas's account of responsibility. The re-reading presented here continues and expands on the long-standing debate between Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Published in English for the first time are two key texts in this debate: "Wholly Otherwise" by Levinas and "At this very moment in this work here I am" by Derrida.
These essays provoke new responses to the work of the eminent French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas through an analysis of how the problematics of reading, deconstruction, feminism, and psychotherapy complicate and deepen Levinas's account of responsibility. The re-reading presented here continues and expands on the long-standing debate between Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Published in English for the first time are two key texts in this debate: "Wholly Otherwise" by Levinas and "At this very moment in this work here I am" by Derrida.
This volume of essays, all but one previously unpublished, investigates the question of Levinas&’s relationship to feminist thought. Levinas, known as the philosopher of the Other, was famously portrayed by Simone de Beauvoir as a patriarchal thinker who denigrated women by viewing them as the paradigmatic Other. Reconsideration of the validity of this interpretation of Levinas and exploration of what more positively can be derived from his thought for feminism are two of this volume&’s primary aims. Levinas breaks with Heidegger&’s phenomenology by understanding the ethical relation to the Other, the face-to-face, as exceeding the language of ontology. The ethical orientation of Levinas&’s philosophy assumes a subject who lives in a world of enjoyment, a world that is made accessible through the dwelling. The feminine presence presides over this dwelling, and the feminine face represents the first welcome. How is this feminine face to be understood? Does it provide a model for the infinite obligation to the Other, or is it a proto-ethical relation? The essays in this volume investigate this dilemma. Contributors are Alison Ainley, Diane Brody, Catherine Chalier, Luce Irigaray, Claire Katz, Kelly Oliver, Diane Perpich, Stella Sandford, Sonya Sikka, and Ewa Ziarek.
The telling of tales is always a troubling business, and the way in which we tell stories about ourselves and about others always involves a degree of ethical risk. Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling explores the troubling nature of storytelling through a reading of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas is a thinker who has a complex relationship with literature and with storytelling. At times, Levinas is a teller of powerful tales about ethics; at other times, on ethical grounds, he disavows storytelling altogether. Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling explores the tensions between philosophy and storytelling that run throughout Levinas's work. By asking about how Levinas tells and untells his stories, and by risking the telling of tales that Levinas himself does not dare to tell, this book opens up new ways of thinking about Levinas's ethics of responsibility. It may be, as Levinas often insists, that storytelling presents us with ethical dangers; but Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling makes the case that an ethics of responsibility may demand that, whilst mindful of these dangers, we nevertheless continually seek out new stories to tell about ourselves, about others and about the world.
"The best introduction available for students of one of the most important philosophers of this century."--"American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly." (Philosophy)
This volume contains the speech given by Derrida at Emmanuel Levinas’s funeral on December 27, 1995, and his contribution to a colloquium organized to mark the first anniversary of Levinas’s death. In this book, Derrida extends his work on Levinas in previously unexplored directions via a radical rereading of Totality and Infinity and the lesser-known Talmudic writings.
Re-reading Derrida: Perspectives on Mourning and its Hospitalities, edited by Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer, is a unique collaborative exploration of the legacies of the late philosopher, Jacques Derrida, across a wide variety of fields. Anchoring the book are two major essays on mourning by two of the best-known Derridean thinkers today, who were close friends of Derrida: J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge. Each of the other essays has been written to respond to these, and—in a novel move—to at least two of the other contributions. As a result, the very form of the book is a way of exploring the thematics of hospitality, and the ways in which disciplines open themselves to one another, extending lines of flight across the archipelagos of knowledge—the politics of the memorial, poetry, trauma, film, neoliberalism, the novel, and psychoanalysis. Throughout the book themes and concerns recur, each time refracted, developed, and questioned under the pressures of new conjunctures. As the editors’ Introduction argues, what the book seeks to show is not that a certain general body of theoretical work can be applied in all sorts of areas, but something more interesting: that from the outset, theoretical work itself takes on its meaning only in its grappling with the specific, the singular, even the unique. Miller’s and Attridge’s essays have at their heart, after all, the loss of a friend.
A comprehensive and original approach to Levinas's philosophy, his ethics, politics, aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics, in the context of his conception of exile.
The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) was one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. This book interprets the Hebrew Bible through the lens of Levinas's religious philosophy. Richard I. Sugarman examines the Pentateuch using a phenomenological approach, drawing on both Levinas's philosophical and Jewish writings. Sugarman puts Levinas in conversation with biblical commentators both classical and modern, including Rashi, Maimonides, Sforno, Hirsch, and Soloveitchik. He particularly highlights Levinas's work on the Talmud and the Holocaust. Levinas's reading is situated against the background of a renewed understanding of such phenomena as covenant, promise, different modalities of time, and justice. The volume is organized to reflect the fifty-four portions of the Torah read during the Jewish liturgical year. A preface provides an overview of Levinas's life, approach, and place in contemporary Jewish thought. The reader emerges with a deeper understanding of both the Torah and the philosophy of a key Jewish thinker.
It is now widely accepted that The Ethics of Deconstruction was the first book to argue for the ethical turn in Derrida's work and to show as powerfully as possible how deconstruction has persuasive ethical consequences that were vital to our thinking through of questions of politics and democracy. Now reissued with three new appendices which restate as well as reflect upon and deepen the book's arguments, The Ethics of Deconstruction is undoubtedly the standard work in the field.
