The Impact of Emmanuel Levinas’ Philosophy on the Problem of Determining Others in Contemporary Society – in Relation to Ethics and Political Practice

This paper aims to examine the impact and overlap of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in connection with the issue of determining others in contemporary modern society, especially in relation to ethical theoretical background and real political practice. This paper aims to relate Levinasian philosophy to the phenomena of contemporary modern society, specifically, its ethics and political practice. This paper intends to capture the relevance of Levinasian philosophy to our current political and religious conflicts, the issue of refugees, immigrants, and the phenomenon of mass migration. In a broader sense, it also reflects upon the issues of racism and globalization as pertinent issues in our current age.

La politique comme le lieu de l’universalisation de l’exigence éthique chez Levinas

Levinasian philosophy is characterized as a philosophy of ethical subjectivity and asymmetrical responsibility. Ethics is understood as the subject that gives itself entirely to the Other. However, the Other is never alone. His face attests to the presence of a third party who, looking at me in his eyes, cries for justice. There is no longer any question for the subject to devote himself entirely to the Other (ethical justice), to give everything to him at the risk of appearing empty-handed before the third party. How then to serve both the Other and the third party? The question of the political appears in the thought of Levinas with the emergence of the third party who, like the Other, challenges me and commands me (social justice). The third party establishes a political space. Politics is in the final analysis the place of the universalization of the ethical requirement born from face-to-face with the face of the Other.

La relation à autrui décrite à partir de l’idée cartésienne de l’infini : Sartre et Levinas

Sartre and Levinas both described the relation to the other referring to Descartes’ idea of the infinite. Comparing these two phenomenologies sheds a light on the great influence Sartre had on Levinas’ ethics. While the two philosophers agree that the other is « a hole in the world » in the sense that he negates my intentionality, they fundamentally differ on the ultimate meaning of this negation. Following the thread of the Cartesian idea of the infinite, this article deciphers Levinas’ critique of Sartre, leading to his ethics of the face.

L’art, entre jouissance et utopie selon Emmanuel Levinas

This text aims to show how, in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the moment of jouissance is constitutive of the selfhood of the ego and conditions the very possibility of a sensitivity to the other man, and so the possibility of the ethical relation itself. These considerations on the enjoyment invited us to think artistic creation and poetry as a way to respond to anesthesia of our sensibility through knowledge, which is a characteristic of western thought for Emmanuel Levinas.

Europhilosophie Winterkurs Coimbra 2020

Report of the study visit in Coimbra

A Chronology of Levinas’s Metaphorics

Many readers of Emmanuel Levinas understand his thought as being oriented only by transcendence and therefore denigrate the immanent dimension of metaphor within his texts. Such readings reduce the complexities of Levinas’s text to a set of polemical, orthodox proclamations such as The Other is Most High and Ethics is First Philosophy. However, Levinas’s work invites us to contemplate not only transcendence, but also the way that immanence emerges though relationships with an infinitude of others, third persons whose voices murmur within the system of language, articulated in concrete elements such as metaphor. Levinas employs metaphor to converse with the inherited ways that temporal becoming has been articulated, recurrently reorienting them to expose a variety of ethical-phenomenological constellations. To expose the dynamics that remain clandestine to the orthodox interpretation, this paper will chronologically trace the development of various families of metaphors such as those of having and doing; those of dimensionality, those of orality, those of familiarity, and those of birth, gender, and death, thereby demonstrating the multitude of roles and perspectival positions assumed by the subject during its temporal becoming.

Reading Levinas’ Deconstruction of Time Through the Ethical Subject

This paper will take a closer look at Levinas' ethical subject and diachronic time in relation to Heidegger's project of Being and Time. Throughout the analysis, I will show how Levinas reformulates Heidegger's task and overcomes its limitation by successfully construing “the whole of time”, in the mode of discontinuity. Levinasian Diachronic time reveals a new signi-fication of finiteness, to be a Messiah, who dedicates oneself to the suffering others without seeking other-worldly hopes, for the “responsibility of a mortal being for a mortal being” itself is “the relationship with the infinite”. Furthermore, I will argue that through this diachronic time, Levinas attempts to construct a new structure of eternity under the influence of Rosenzweig. Levinas declares that only after falsifying hopes are dissolved in despair, infinity breaks into time, and enables “mortal human beings” to participate in “immortality” through the time of the Other. Whereas Heideggerian ontology attempted to articulate the meaning of Being-in-general based on the being of Dasein and temporality, Levinas captures that the pri-mordial horizon of ethics is the manifestation of the face of the Other and diachronic time, which lead us to think beyond Being, namely, “the otherwise than being”.

Préface

Editorial

Einleitung: Philosophie als Passion. Das gebrochene Denken von Emmanuel Levinas

The essay gives a short introduction to Levinas’ passionate thinking by focusing on the failure of all philosophical trials in theodicy.

Repenser la subjectivité incarnée. Levinas lecteur de Husserl

This paper intends to analyze the question of the embodied subjectivity in Emmanuel Levinas’s work, starting from a specific point of view: the controversial reception of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the early period of his confrontation with Husserl, Levinas criticizes the excess of theoreticism in transcendental idealism. However, he then seems to discover right inside of it the conditions to bring the philosophical debate out of the limits of knowledge theory. This is when he recognizes the important role played by the body in the husserlian description of the act of sense-giving (Sinngebung). Though, while praising Husserl for his conception of sensibility – as the “Commentaires nouveaux” clearly show – Levinas actually proceeds to an original rethinking of the meaning of incarnation, beyond the purity of the ego, and the supposed “property” of the flesh.