This study is an examination of the early philosophical writings by Emmanuel Levinas, and shows how transcendence became his guiding question. The study has three parts. Part One lays out Levinas' early enthusiasm with regard to Heidegger's phenomenology. Part Two consists of close readings of three essays by Levinas from 1933 to 1935. It traces the shift in Levinas' relation to Heideggerian philosophy, a shift that may have been motivated by Heidegger's political commitments, but which was thought through philosophically. The (...) work of these years culminates with the formulation of what would remain Levinas' guiding question: the problem of transcendence. Part Three, finally, shows how Levinas in his mature works answers his question in the account of fecundity and the account of ethical subjectivity structured as substitution. (shrink)

Before the trains of thought have been firmly laid down, we ask in this article about the very nature and histories of the speculative of the speculative-materialist turn. We do this from the intertwined interfaces of curious feminist materialisms, foregrounding sexual difference, post-positivist critique and posthumanist performativity such as is being done in various strands of feminist theory today. The question of speculation plays a constitutive role in feminist critique and in several new or neo-materialist traditions. In fact, many interesting (...) materialisms—Marxism, French feminism—can be named ‘speculative’. We argue that in spite of what the recent ‘speculative turn’ professes, speculative materialisms have a complex genealogy. Speculation functions transversally in a materialist genealogy -connecting the archive of feminist approaches in particular. In order to be able to imagine a different world we need to think through a stifled and sexually differentiated present from which a qualitative shift and political breakthrough can be formulated, and hopefully achieved. However, in what is currently called ‘speculative realism’ or ‘object-oriented ontologies’ neither speculation nor the speculative are reflected upon as a heritage from and alliance with feminist and politically materialist positions. What are the onto-epistemological stakes of this body of work? And what ethico-political horizons are drawn here? We stand speculative before such turn. (shrink)