This essay rearticulates historical and contemporary security discourse as a politics of desire bound to a masculinist and racialized notion of Selfhood. The Persian Gulf War and the Canada/Spain Turbot War are presented as case studies which typify how the securing of desire through warfare proceeds from an idea of the desirous rival a Other. The essay counters Guardian and Lananian narratives of a desire which emanates from a sense of lack, and leads to violence, with Levinas's understanding of desire (...) as central to, rather than disruptive of, an ethical relation with alterity. (shrink)

This article addresses Emmanuel Levinas's re-conceptualization of Jewish identity by examining his response to a question he himself poses: “In which sense do we need a Jewish science?” First, I attend to Levinas's critique of modern science of Judaism, particularly as it was understood in the critical approaches of the nineteenth-century school of thought, Wissenschaft des Judentums. Next, I detail Levinas's own constructive proposal that would, in his words, “enlarge the science of Judaism.” He retrieved classical textual sources that modern (...) Judaism had neglected, while at the same time he enlarged Judaism's relevance beyond a historical community by turning to phenomenology as a rigorous science. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the broader implications of this new science of Judaism for Jewish ethics and identity in a post-war period. (shrink)

Levinas's work persistently challenges the claim that the sovereignty of the ego is the foundation for ethics, a claim he attributes to the Greek philosophical tradition. This claim emerges in dominant accounts of responsibility, in which the agent's intentions define his or her culpability. However, in Oedipus Tyrannos Sophocles also attempts to undermine this strict pairing of responsibility and deliberate choice. Oedipus undergoes a fundamentally Levinasian narrative arc by moving from self-assured sovereignty, based on his ability to comprehend the world, (...) to an awakening to responsibility. In this essay I examine the points of intersection and divergence between the tragic narrative of Oedipus and the traumatic subject in Levinas's work. (shrink)

This article compares three important Jewish philosophers of our century with each other: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Lévinas. There are some obvious reasons for doing this already in the facts that Buber and Rosenzweig for years worked close to each other and that Lévinas himself acknowledged his debt to Rosenzweig. Their philosophical closeness expresses itself in their stress that philosophy cannot be content with an observing attitude which assigns man a place in an all-encompassing totality. Man is included (...) in a social world of living relations. They reject the all-inclusiveness of the subjective self, the experience of the consciousness in Husserl’s phenomenology. For all of them inter-subjectivity was crucial and they stressed the need to give space to “the other” and concede the difference of the other. The other should, like the self, be considered unique, not “the same”. The other actually resists all my attempts to include it and make it part of my own consciousness. They differ from each other in the way they see the relations between myself and the other. Buber stressed the mutuality of the dialogue, whereas Lévinas thought that the question of mutuality has to be left to the other. What is important is, according to Lévinas, that I am not allowed to turn away from the other. Buber also stressed the uniqueness of the dialogue and its qualitative difference from the other main type of relationship. Rosenzweig criticized what he considered Buber’s “dualism” between “you” and “it” and accused Buber for devaluating the “it” which is also God’s creation and therefore important. (shrink)