In this article, the differences between Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger’s approaches to ontotheology are discussed. Whereas Marion argues for a historical approach to this question, i.e., testing whether ontotheology can be detected in this or that thinker in this history of philosophy, this article aims, with Levinas and Heidegger, for an ontological approach to the question concerning ontotheology. In this regard, this text expresses wonder about Marion’s claim that Medieval theology would not have succumbed to ontotheology whereas (...) ancient and modern did. It is shown that ontotheology, for Levinas as well as Heidegger, might not be overcome with a simple command but rather belongs to the very structure of thought. The article concludes with offering some corrections to the Levinasian ‘God outside of onto-theology’ by a more phenomenological account of being-in-the world. (shrink)

This contribution is a critical and constructive engage ment with discourse ethics. First, it clarifies why discourse ethics has difficulties with the grounding and application of moral norms. Second, it turns to a positive appropriation of the formal and proce dural aspects of discourse ethics. The goal is the elaboration of an ethics that is able to incorporate the material aspects of goods and the formal dimension of ethical validity and consensuability. Every morality is the formal application of some substantive (...) good. Every ethical perspective demands its evaluation in terms of its uni versability. In order to achieve this mediation, it is suggested that we must incorporate not only the historical dimension of moral systems, but also the role of critical consciousness and the negativity embod ied by those who are victims of the existing consensus. The essay con cludes with six points that need to be considered when formulating a material ethics that is universalizable and, most importantly, that can address the massive poverty and dehumanization of those excluded from the present community of communication. Key Words: application • consensual • corporeality • discourse ethics • formal • grounding • intersubjective • Kantian • liberation • ethics • material • phronesis • procedural • validity. (shrink)

This essay discusses Stanley Cavell’s remarkable interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought against the background of his own ongoing engagement with Wittgenstein, Austin, and the problem of other minds. This unlikely debate, the only extensive discussion of Levinas by Cavell in his long philosophical career sofar, focuses on their different reception of Descartes’s idea of the infinite. The essay proposes to read both thinkers against the background of Wittgenstein’s model of philosophical meditation and raises the question as to whether Cavell and (...) Levinas do not indirectly shed light on the early modern motif of the spiritual automaton. (shrink)

One of Michel Henry’s persistent claims has been that phenomenology is quite unlike positive sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, history, and law. Rather than studying particular objects and phenomena phenomenology is a transcendental enterprise whose task is to disclose and analyse the structure of manifestation or appearance and its very condition of possibility.

This paper focuses on the set of problems regarding the HIV/AIDS crisis in the specific domain of corporate moral responsibility within a context of the Levinasian notion of proximity (infinite responsibility) and the Third. Against a totalitarian, homogeneous society, Levinas opens the way to a social pluralism, which has its sources in the disquiet provoked by the strangeness of the Other's face. Corporate responsibility, understood from this point of view, would not reduce institutional relations to an anonymous world of neutrality. (...) Corporate responsibility is unconditional in the sense that to be responsible is not a question of choice, but one of deep liberty, the liberty of taking the burden of the infinite responsibility for the Other customers, employees, the public at large and those who suffer in the world. This paper argues that it would then also mean that society (individuals, NGOs and governments) in accordance with the spirit of the Levinasian philosophy of infinite responsibility could exert pressure on corporations, such as pharmaceutical companies. Owing to their power, they could change their present responsibility policies to a more affirmative and engaged responsibility with regard to those who are ill and who suffer death or debilitation from HIV/AIDS and other prevalent diseases in the poorest parts of the world today. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Education is in itself a project of Enlightenment. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, whose origin and development bear the imprint of self-destructive social-cultural processes of modernity and of the Holocaust, can count as an attempt to continue the process of Enlightenment through radical self-criticism. The paper presents the approach of the first generation of critical theory and then Jurgen Habermas' critique of this approach and his reconstruction of critical theory in his theory of communicative action. Special emphasis (...) is laid on the discussion of the ethical implications of human communication. From this background the paper enquires what significance these reflections could have for a revised concept of education. (shrink)

The article investigates how two different conceptions of the edifying potential of education attempt to take into account the normative dimension of scientific knowledge. In the first conception it is the demand for truth that is edifying, whereas in the second concept it is a distinctively ethical demand. It is argued that the first concept in the end implies the subjection of education to the ‘brutality of facticity’, under which it risks losing its critical point. The second conception, drawing on (...) Levinas and Arendt, tries to safeguard this critical point. It conceives education as a process through which scientific knowledge is made subject to reflection, and is thus confronted with the ethical challenges and demands of society. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the set of problems regarding the HIV/AIDS crisis in the specific domain of corporate moral responsibility within a context of the Levinasian notion of proximity and the Third. Against a totalitarian, homogeneous society, Levinas opens the way to a social pluralism, which has its sources in the disquiet provoked by the strangeness of the Other's face. Corporate responsibility, understood from this point of view, would not reduce institutional relations to an anonymous world of neutrality. Corporate responsibility (...) is unconditional in the sense that to be responsible is not a question of choice, but one of deep liberty, the liberty of taking the burden of the infinite responsibility for the Other – customers, employees, the public at large and those who suffer in the world. This paper argues that it would then also mean that society in accordance with the spirit of the Levinasian philosophy of infinite responsibility could exert pressure on corporations, such as pharmaceutical companies. Owing to their power, they could change their present responsibility policies to a more affirmative and engaged responsibility with regard to those who are ill and who suffer death or debilitation from HIV/AIDS and other prevalent diseases in the poorest parts of the world today. (shrink)

The moral philosophy of Levinas offers a stark prospectus of impossibility for corporate ethics. It differs from most traditional ethical theories in that, for Levinas, the ethical develops in a personal meeting of one with the Other, rather than residing in some internal deliberation of the moral subject. Levinasian ethics emphasizes an infinite personal responsibility arising for each of us in the face of the Other and in the presence of the Third. It stresses the imperious demand we experience to (...) be open to, prepared for and impassioned with that which we may not know, or recognize, about ourselves or about the Other. Such a demand transcends our intellectual and/or rational potential; it involves us in a carnal and somatic bodily experience of otherness. If we are to speak of Levinasian ethics in a business context, it cannot be a matter of corporate ethics but only a matter of individual managerial ethics. What such an ethics would be like is yet to be outlined. This paper proposes a series of questions and suggestions that will explicate some key terms of a practice organized around a Levinasian vocabulary of otherness, responsibility, proximity, diachrony and justice. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the what, the how, and the why of moral phenomenology. I consider first the question What is moral phenomenology?, secondly the question How to pursue moral phenomenology?, and thirdly the question Why pursue moral phenomenology? My treatment of these questions is preliminary and tentative, and is meant not so much to settle them as to point in their answers’ direction.

El presente artículo busca interrogar al fenómeno de la apelación. Para ello, se examinará el vínculo entre fenomenología y apelación preguntándonos qué es preciso entender por la máxima husserliana que conmina a un retorno a las cosas mismas; en segundo lugar, intentaremos dilucidar cómo la obediencia crítica a la consigna fenomenológica ha supuesto una recomprensión de fenómeno al punto de transformar la consigna husserliana en un verdadero “retorno de las cosas mismas”. Finalmente, nos proponemos interrogar la apelación del fenómeno, a (...) partir del diálogo entre Marion y Romano. No solo intentaremos dilucidar cuál es la especificidad de la apelación, sino qué relación estricta hay entre fenómeno, particularmente insigne o saturado y apelación. (shrink)

Education is in itself a project of Enlightenment. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, whose origin and development bear the imprint of self-destructive social-cultural processes of modernity and of the Holocaust, can count as an attempt to continue the process of Enlightenment through radical self-criticism. The paper presents the approach of the first generation of critical theory and then Jurgen Habermas’ critique of this approach and his reconstruction of critical theory in his theory of communicative action. Special emphasis is (...) laid on the discussion of the ethical implications of human communication. From this background the paper enquires what significance these reflections could have for a revised concept of education. (shrink)

This essay discusses Stanley Cavell's remarkable interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas's thought against the background of his own ongoing engagement with Wittgenstein, Austin, and the problem of other minds. This unlikely debate, the only extensive discussion of Levinas by Cavell in his long philosophical career so-far, focuses on their different reception of Descartes's idea of the infinite. The essay proposes to read both thinkers against the background of Wittgenstein's model of philosophical meditation and raises the question as to whether Cavell and (...) Levinas do not indirectly shed light on the early modern motif of the spiritual automaton. (shrink)

Abstract The idea of ?election? cannot be approached, it seems, through traditional or classical philosophical conceptuality. This idea requires another type of discourse. Not simply because this idea refers to an entirely other body of texts, that of the Biblical tradition, but more radically since it commands another modality of thought which must at once suspend and pursue philosophical concepts to the point where they express themselves otherwise than according to the rationality of their own deployment. In truth, the idea (...) of ?election? calls thus for a redefinition of the rapport between singularity and universality, one no longer structured and circumscribed by ?truth?, but rather inspired by a novel and irreducible modality of ?justice?. A ?justice? which opens to the possibility for an ?ethics?, not as ?communicative dialogue?, ?mutual recognition? or a series of established and rationally grounded laws, but a ?place? of incessant and irresolute, non-intentional and unconditional exposition to the Other. (shrink)

Alfred Schütz is often credited with providing sociology with a firm ground derived from phenomenology of science and justifying it as a science operating within natural attitude. Although his project of social science draws extensively on Edmund Husserl’s theory of attitudes, it would be incorrect to assume that Schütz shares with the founder of phenomenology his conception of science. This paper compares Husserl’s and Schütz’s views on the structure and meaning of science and traces the roots of their radical divergence. (...) Whereas Husserl increasingly emphasises the importance of phenomenological reduction for the genuine human science, Schütz eventually rejects reduction and restricts the social science to a specific system of relevancies within the reality of the lifeworld. This paper presents the argument that Schütz’s conception eliminates the possibility of a phenomenological justification of social science, as it implies that there are no rationally justifiable grounds to pursue science. In this way, Schütz’s views substantially differ from the phenomenological theory of science and become open to the phenomenological critique of naivety. (shrink)

Un primer aspecto concierne a la praxis no-intencional y primaria del cuerpo propio. A ello se añade su condición de sostén para los valores sensibles de la comodidad y la salud, y de trampolín para valores espirituales cuyo nivel superior se encuentra en los valores éticos de la persona. Estos puntos de vista husserlianos encuentran nuevos desarrollos en la fenomenología: M. Henry pone el acento en un "yo puedo" pre-intencional, y Ricoeur describe el cuerpo propio como "fuente" de valores propios (...) y "resonador afectivo" de todos los valores, y a la vez esboza una concepción de la felicidad que incluye temples particulares de la corporalidad. Por último, Husserl considera la ofrenda del cuerpo propio a los valores espirituales en el sacrificio como la afirmación positiva de la vida de la humanidad. J. Patocka y E. Lévinas han desarrollado esta línea de pensamiento. A first aspect has to do with the non-intentional and primal praxis of the living body. To this is added its status as a support for the sensuous values of comfort and health and a springboard for spiritual values, the highest level of which lies in the ethical values of the person. These Husserlian views find new developments in phe-nomenology: M. Henry highlights a pre-intentional "I can", M. Scheler analyzes the relationship between hedonistic, vital, and spiritual values, and P. Ricoeur describes the living body both as the "source" ofits own proper values and the "affective resonator" of all values, and also outlines a view on happiness that encompasses particular bodily attunements. Finally, Husserl considers the offering of the living body to spiritual values in sacrifice as the positive assertion of humankind's life. J. Patocka and E. Lévinas have developed this line of thought. (shrink)

La catégorie de l'hospitalité ne constitue pas une nouvelle perspective de l'éthique contemporaine; c'est plutôt l'une des plus vieilles notions éthiques que l'histoire de l'humanité nous ait données.Conscient de cette particularité, le philosophe espagnol Daniel Innerarity propose un repositionnement anthropologique de l'hospitalité qui ébranle sérieusement les assises théoriques des perspectives classiques de l'identité, de la subjectivité, de la conscience de l'espace et, particulièrement, du temps. Daniel Innerarity repose la question de l'hospitalité dans une époque déboussolée qui est la nôtre. Il (...) introduit l'idée d'une hospitalité à partir de ce que nous pourrions nommer " une ouverture à l'impromptu ". Une ouverture à la contingence, une éthique de la réception de la fortune, l'hospitalité comme une occasion d'accueillir ce qui arrive sans notre consentement, comme une occasion qui nous est offerte. Pour Daniel Innerarity, notre monde " sans centre " et " sans environs ", tiraillé entre " les impératifs de la modernisation et de la croissance et les exigences d'une éthique de la conservation, de la prudence et de la protection ", nous invite, avant tout, à acquérir de nouvelles attitudes et aptitudes interprétatives. Ce livre n'a pas pour objet l'étude exégétique de l'essai Ethique de l'hospitalité de Daniel Innerarity, mais cherche plutôt à l'inscrire dans un jeu de dialogues avec des chercheurs de différents horizons qui ont comme sens commun de faire résonner le concept d'hospitalité dans leurs perspectives distinctes. Ce jeu de dialogues se termine sur un texte inéditde Daniel Innerarity sur l'hospitalité. (shrink)

Since 2008, in Flanders, we organize immersion sessions in a simulated context with the aim of stimulating student nurses and health professionals to learn virtuous caring. In this contribution, we first outline the purpose of this experiential learning: the cultivation of moral character. We come to the core of what we mean by moral character for care. We refer to Joan Tronto and Stan van Hooft to claim that caring is central to all aspects of nursing practice and is the (...) basis of its moral quality. We also stipulate that caring involves the integration of action with emotions, motivations, and knowledge. Second, we briefly explain how the immersion sessions in the care ethics lab take place and, in particular, reflect on what it yields in terms of experiences for the participants who take on the role of simulant patients in this experiential learning process. We focus on the significant role contrast experiences play in these experiences. Especially the negative contrast experiences do not wear off easily; care professionals remember even long after the immersion session and continue to carry them with them as a “corporeal built-in alarm.” Third, we discuss the role of contrast experiences in cultivating moral character for care. In particular, we explore the role of the body in the kind of knowing it cultivates and, by extension, its role in cultivating virtuous caring. By referring to specific philosophical ideas of Gabriël Marcel, Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Levinas, we try to understand how contrast experiences bring about an integration of virtuous action into knowledge, motivation, and emotion. We conclude that we need more space for contrast experiences in cultivating moral character. More attention should be paid to the role of the body in this learning process. (shrink)

The article proposes a reflection on cultural sign production in social contexts dominated by the socially generalized fear of the unknown other and the obsession for vulnerability avoidance. This phenomenon has been reflected in the generalized tendency of reliance upon contractual trust, where the coherence of the signs legitimating a trustful relationship is maintained by external agencies backed by authoritative forums (e.g., religious, legal, political) and sanctioned by well-defined rewards and punishments. In contrast with the contractual model of trust, I (...) propose a different model, covenantal trust. Taking as a point of departure Levinas’s phenomenological interpretation of the responsible self-opening toward the “sign of the giving of signs” which involves covenantal elements, I advance toward proposing a more active involvement of the participants in the process of joint production of signs. This dynamic involvement is made possible thanks to essential elements of the covenant, such as summoning and response. The covenantal approach aims at proposing a semioethical solution to the social challenges emerging from frustrations of members of both marginal and external communities for being treated distrustfully. (shrink)

This paper criticizes social revolution, by focusing on the reconfiguration of the notion from an ethical point of view. It is divided in three sections: Brother’s death; Remove the sandals; Thou wilt be as many as the stars. Each section contains Levinas’s thought as the main axis. Although it is well known that Levinas does not develop a theory of revolution, it is possible to find a fruitful analysis in light of his meditations about politics and ethics.

Does atrocity age? What I mean to ask is, does time heal wounds that were genocidal or otherwise broad, deep, and caused by a fatal combination of human depravity and widespread indifference? Jean Améry famously refused to let the past be past in his essay “Resentments.” He argued that even if, with regard to the Holocaust, logically speaking, what happened is in the past, there is no moral sense to that. Morality requires of us that we refuse to let the (...) past be whenever we are faced with a past that should have been otherwise. For him, writing 20 years after he was freed from the camps, time had not healed all wounds. Atrocity was not aging gracefully. (shrink)

This paper compares the later Levinas’ notion of “substitution” with Kant’s account of substitution in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Kant’s account is modelled on the Christian doctrine of the vicarious substitution of Christ, and some recent commentators on Levinas have argued that Levinas’ account is also similar to this Christian doctrine. By bringing out what I see as major differences between the two accounts, I show that Levinas’ notion of substitution should not be understood in this way.

Alexander Schnell | : La position défendue dans cette contribution consiste à montrer que la compréhension de la phénoménologie comme philosophie transcendantale implique le recours à la philosophie allemande classique. L’auteur étudie, à ce dessein, une perspective d’abord gnoséologique puis ontologique, commandées sur différents registres par les concepts d’« intuition », de « construction » et de « possibilisation ». Dans un troisième moment, il établit comment, dans une perspective tirant les conclusions « métaphysiques » de ces élaborations phénoménologiques, ces (...) deux volets peuvent être envisagés dans un projet unitaire où la « possibilisation » est conçue comme une « réflexion de la réflexion ». | : In this paper I defend the idea, that the comprehension of Phenomenology as “transcendental philosophy” requires to establish the link between Phenomenology and Classical German Philosophy. I analyze for this purpose an epistemological and than an ontological perspective where the concepts of “intuition”, of “construction”, and of “possibilisation” play a first role. Then I try to show — in a perspective drawing the metaphysical conclusions of these phenomenological analyses — that these two perspectives can be integrated in a common project where “possibilisation” is conceived of as a “reflexion of the reflexion”. (shrink)

Christian ideas have continued to inspire European bioethics until now. The central thesis of this essay is that the open-mindedness of Roman Catholic and other Christian denominations in Europe is crucial for understanding why Christian ethics is so well integrated in the European culture. The essay describes first the institutional frameworks in which these Christian mainly Roman Catholic ideas are developed. It analyzes further the difference between the secular Anglo-American and European bioethics as it has been influenced by these Christian (...) ideas. It finally summarizes the challenges to which Europe's Christian bioethical identity is presently exposed to. The essay states that the Christian inspiration of European bioethics is mainly connected with the ideologically moderate, tolerant, and dialogical participation of Christian bioethicists in the bioethical debate in Europe. (shrink)

The link between force, violence and events in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida is explored, arguing that this relationship is at the very heart of the problem of meaning and its performativity. This thesis is based on the analysis of Derrida’s reading of both Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, as well as Austin’s linguistic performative theory, which allows, at first, to link the question of signification with that of force or violence. Subsequently, we use the analysis of W. Hamacher about Benjamin (...) in order to strengthen that connection and propose a new reading of the question of the event in Derrida. We obtain a philosophy of the event that moves between ethics, politics and linguistics that allows new approaches to the “critique” of violence. (shrink)

This essay aims to broaden the understanding of the nature of the physician–patient relationship. To do so, the concept of medical philia that Pedro Laín Entralgo proposes is analysed and is considered taking into consideration the relational trait of the human being and the structure of human action as a story of the permanent tension that exists between freedom and truth, where the ontological foundation of the hermeneutic of the "Gift" and the analogy of “Love” as the central dynamic of (...) this action, helps explain the nature of the doctor-patient relationship as a "friendship relationship". This understanding offers a perspective differing from just the utilitarian considerations of current "patient-centred" approaches and proposed the redirection of the teaching of medicine to more humanistic approaches. The dynamic of the doctor-patient relationship proposed here in its most genuine essence is effectively expressed in physician concrete attitudes that the patient usually captures and relates as the “the doctor’s way of being”. Goya's painting, Self-portrait with Dr Arrieta (1820), can be taken as an outstanding artistic representation of this expanded dimension of the medical act, capturing the “medical friendship” in action. (shrink)

This essay develops an approach to a phenomenology of shame by taking recourse to different notions of shame found in various humanistic disciplines and in the history of phenomenology. The first part of this paper analyzes some of the central ideas on the nature of shame to be found in cultural anthropology, pedagogy, history and psychoanalysis. The second part discusses the phenomenological theories of shame proposed by Sartre and Levinas. Since their approaches are opposite to each other in crucial respects, (...) the third part of this paper returns to the analyses of shame undertaken in the first part in order to resolve this apparent conflict and advance a coherent theory of shame. The essay’s final thesis is that shame is neither fundamentally destructive nor fundamentally constructive but that it can assume both guises. While it can threaten the subject up to the point of destruction triggering it in aggressive defensive mechanisms, it can also contribute to the development of the subject into a fully free individual capable of acknowledging and answering to others. (shrink)

Drawing upon the practice of caregiving and the insights of feminist care ethics, I offer a phenomenology of caregiving through the work of Eva Feder Kittay and Emmanuel Lévinas. I argue that caregiving is a material dialectic of embodied response involving moments of leveling, attention, and interruption. In this light, the Levinasian opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity-based principles is belied in the experience of care. Contra much of response ethics’ and care ethics’ respective literatures, (...) this dialectic suggests that they are complementary in ways that productively illuminate themes of each. I conclude by suggesting that when response and care ethics are thought together through the experience of caregiving, such labors produce finite responsibility with infinite hope. (shrink)

Based on the reception of Emmanuel Levinas philosophy in the English-speaking world, the paper highlights some tendencies in reading and commenting on classical philosophical works that have been the focus of attention for a long time. The author makes a suggestion that we can find persistent but nonetheless dynamic, patterns of commenting and interpreting. The first wave of Levinas studies was apologetic and laudatory. Its main task was to introduce new concepts, i.e. to paraphrase. The second wave was much more (...) appropriative and critical. In this period, the scholars tried to apply the philosophy of the Other to existing problems or they tried to resolve the paradoxes that were the products of apologetic readings. The today’s third wave recreates and readjusts interpretive strategies inherent to the first and second wave. To explain this dynamics of reading, the paper introduces a normative scheme that consists of three regulative principles – “faithfully”, “truthfully”, and “ethically”. Due to this tripartite opposition, in which “faithfully” refers to fidelity to an original, “truthfully” refers to the search for universal truth, and “ethically” refers to the inaccessibility for an ego to grab hold of a text of another person, commenting grows intensive. In addition, the opposition of “faithfully” and “truthfully” demonstrates some liberty in such, to some extent, involuntary practice as commenting. This reflexion helps identify the current phase of commenting on classical texts and the intentions of readers and commentators. What is more, it provides justifications for innovative readings of Levinas’ oeuvre as well as the texts of other great philosophers. (shrink)

La filosofía de Lévinas se inspira en las fuentes tradicionales del judaísmo, por más que apenas consienta que afloren a la superficie del discurso. De ahí la conveniencia de abordar su obra como un palimpsesto en el que operan dos niveles textuales, uno de ellos explícito y el otro velado. El Otro y el Mismo se relacionan entre sí según el modelo bíblico del vínculo YHWH-Israel: mientras que la Revelación inspira la epifanía del rostro, la Redención subyace a la reconstrucción (...) de la subjetividad en clave ética. En su conjunto, la heterología de Lévinas reitera, en el elemento de la filosofía, las experiencias centrales del monoteísmo hebreo. (shrink)

Identity as traditionally conceived in mainstream Western thought is focused on theory, representation, knowledge, subjectivity and is centrally important in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. His critique of Western culture and corresponding notion of identity at its foundations typically raises the question of the other. Alterity in Levinas indicates existence of something on its own account, in itself independently of the subject’s will or consciousness. The objectivity of alterity tells of the impossible evasion of signs from their destiny, which is (...) the other. The implications involved in reading the signs of the other have contributed to reorienting semiotics in the direction of semioethics. In Levinas, the I-other relation is not reducible to abstract cognitive terms, to intellectual synthesis, to the subject-object relation, but rather tells of involvement among singularities whose distinctive feature is alterity, absolute alterity. Humanism of the other is a pivotal concept in Levinas overturning the sense of Western reason. It asserts human duties over human rights. Humanism of alterity privileges encounter with the other, responsibility for the other, over tendencies of the centripetal and egocentric orders that instead exclude the other. Responsibility allows for neither rest nor peace. The “properly human” is given in the capacity for absolute otherness, unlimited responsibility, dialogical intercorporeity among differences non-indifferent to each other, it tells of the condition of vulnerability before the other, exposition to the other. The State and its laws limit responsibility for the other. Levinas signals an essential contradiction between the primordial ethical orientation and the legal order. Justice involves comparing incomparables, comparison among singularities outside identity. Consequently, justice places limitations on responsibility, on unlimited responsibility which at the same time it presupposes as its very condition of possibility. The present essay is structured around the following themes: Premiss; Justice, uniqueness, and love; Sign and language; Dialogue and alterity; Semiotic materiality; Globalization and the trap of identity; Human rights and rights of the other: for a new humanism; Ethics; The World; Outside the subject; Responsibility and Substitution; The face; Fear of the other; Alterity and justice; Justice and proximity; Literary writing; Unjust justice; Caring for the other. (shrink)

Resumen El presente artículo investiga los fundamentos creacionales del mesianismo en el pensamiento del pensador judío Emmanuel Levinas. Revisando diversos escritos judíos y filosóficos del autor se muestra que el ser humano, creado a partir de la nada, separado, soberano en su dependencia, está convo cado a ser responsable y a promover la vida de los demás, sustituyendo, incluso, a los otros, poniéndose en su lugar, asumiendo sus pesares y dolores, haciéndo se cargo de ese modo del sufrimiento universal. Con (...) todo, para Levinas el “yo” es quien está llamado a asumir su singular vocación mesiánica, a afirmar “heme aquí”. Y este mismo Yo es aquel, que antes de toda decisión, ha sido elegido para soportar toda la responsabilidad del Mundo y en consecuencia es el llamado a ser “Mesías”.This article investigates the creationalfoundations of messianism in the thought of the Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas. Reviewing various Jewish andphilosophical writ- ings of the author it is shown that the human being, created from nothingg, separated, sovereign in his dependence, is summoned to be responsible and promote the lives of others, even replac- ing others, putting himself in hisplace, assuming his sorrows andpains, thereby taking charge of universal suffering. However, for Levinas the “I” is the one who is called to assume his singular messianic vocation, to affirm “here I am”. And this same “I” is the one who, before any decision, has been chosen to bear all the responsibility of the World and conse- quently is the call to be “Messiah”. (shrink)

In this article the author seeks to highlight a specific disorder related to bodily experience in melancholia conceived as a severe form of clinical depression. The article is divided into three parts. In the first section, the author investigates the intersubjective dimension of bodily experience in light of the categories of Außen- and Innenleiblichkeit. In the second section, I explore a specific disturbance of the dimension of intercorporeality. The excessive feeling of the bodily (außenleibliche) visibility of his/her own sufferance is (...) a fundamental aspect of depression. At a pre-reflexive level, we constantly assume the noncoincidence between one's own bodily expression and the Other's experience/reading of these expressions. An alteration of this (pre-reflexive) awareness occurs in melancholia. The patient feels as if the melancholic condition would be transparent to the other. In the third section, the author intends to show the alteration of the embodied communication between the melancholic person and the other investigating two particular phenomena: the exchange of gaze in a face to face encounter, and the disturbance of the oral sense, revealing a specific form of irresponsiveness and the experience of void. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ Cet article analyse le problème de la souffrance dans l'œuvre de Lévinas à la lumière de la critique nietzschéenne de la compassion. Il s'agit dans un premier temps de montrer que, bien que la description que fait Lévinas de la souffrance éthique soit similaire à l'idée nietzschéenne de la souffrance tragique ou inutile, les premiers écrits de Lévinas se concentrent aussi sur les dangers politiques qui resultent de la conception nietzschéenne du corps et de sa vision tragique de la (...) souffrance. Dans un second temps, cet article se propose de montrer que la souffrance éthique telle que la décrit Lévinas ne correspond pas à la façon dont Nietzsche décrit la compassion comme étant une forme de nihilisme. Il soutient au contraire l'idée que la souffrance éthique chez Lévinas permet d'aller plus loin dans la conception qu'a Nietzsche de l'amitié et de la vie ABSTRACT This article analyses the problem of suffering in Lévinas's work in the light of Nietzsche's critic of compassion. It argues, in a first step, that although Lévinas's description of ethical suffering is similar to Nietzsche's description of suffering as tragic or useless, Lévinas's first writings also focus on the political dangers associated with Nietzsche's conception of the body and of a purely tragic conception of suffering. In a second step, this article shows that the question of ethical suffering, such as Lévinas describes it, does not match Nietzsche's conception of compassion as being a form of nihilism, but, on the contrary, allows for the radicalization of some of Nietzsche's views on friendship and of life. (shrink)

Este texto sigue el movimiento de la palabra “anarquía” en De otro modo que ser. Este término que Lévinas despolitiza al acudir a su sentido estrictamente etimológico, viene al texto como un exceso que no puede recogerse bajo la unidad de un nombre o de un discurso. Lo que se busca con este texto es explorar la significación de esta anarquía, su relación con el orden discursivo y con el orden político, para preguntar finalmente si la anarquía no acaba de (...) alguna manera siendo neutralizada en una forma de poder soberano que dicta la orden ética desde una cierta bondad originaria y originante. (shrink)

Sin tantear recorridos lineales, la mayor parte de los siguientes renglones, entresacados de aquellos parajes por los que merodearían los lectores de Emmanuel Lévinas más propensos a las responsabilidades del sueño lúcido, modifican unas páginas de Teleón, obra no del todo en marcha entregada a las excursiones que la escritura de León de Greiff estimula a través de regiones y climas no siempre incluidos en los informes de la crítica literaria o en los plegables temáticos de los debates ideológicos. A (...) distinción de los textos del lituano y demás autores mencionados, ningún dispositivo referencial acompaña las citas inherentes a las composiciones del antioqueño, no propiamente con la intención de dar a entender que su procedencia debería resultar descontada a las generaciones sumidas en todos los hechos y en los hechos del Todo que, a juicio de algún televidente muy dueño y señor de su cabeza, refutarían las exigencias éticas de Lévinas, si acaso con el propósito de sugerir la urgencia de subvertir los criterios de vigilancia universitaria acogiendo el asomo del otro, ningún duplicado, ningún paredros gnóstico, sino el otro expirante e inspirante, el poeta en persona, quien por ventura los devolvería al sarcófago vacío de la “momia fiambre” que nunca quiso llegar a ser. (shrink)

La formulación tradicional de los derechos humanos se basa en la libertad y la igualdad, pero Emmanuel Lévinas hace de la diferencia absoluta la fuente y el fundamento de tales derechos. Los Derechos Humanos aparecen entonces como los derechos del Otro y extienden el alcance de la responsabilidad hasta comprometer la propia libertad. La primera parte de este trabajo muestra cómo la preocupación por los derechos humanos fue una constante en la existencia y el pensamiento de Lévinas. La segunda parte (...) está dedicada a exponer la fundamentación levinasiana de los derechos humanos con base en la illeidad. (shrink)

Do our present circumstances allow us to defend a specific connection (that specific connection) between «legal rules», «moral claims» and «democratic principles» which we may say is granted by an unproblematic presupposition of universality or by an «acultural» experience of modernity? In order to discuss this question, this paper invokes the challenge-visée of a plausible reinvention of Law’s autonomous project (a reinvention which may be capable of critically re-thinking and re-experiencing Law’s constitutive cultural-civilizational originarium in a «limit-situation» such as our (...) own). The discussion is developed by recognising that the claim to universality is not only incompatible with a substantive conception of juridicalness as validity but also sustained with difficulty by a procedural representation of discourse and rationality (a representation which, against its own conclusion-claims, could also be said to be culturally and civilizationally bounded). Not forgetting some specific features of contemporary juridical pluralism—namely that which emerges from the counterpoint between semiotic groups or interpretative communities (and their differently assumed claims of intersemioticity concerning the signifier law)—this train of reflection diagnoses briefly a sequence of complementary main difficulties (as «obstacles» to recognising Law’s demand as an unmistakable cultural project), namely those arising from the formalistic normativistic inheritance (confounding legal autonomy with isolationism), from the challenges and seductions of practical holism (justifying a continuum in which Law’s project loses its sense and autonomy), and also from the familiar debate between exclusive and inclusive versions of positivism and non-positivism (a debate which establishes-consecrates an equivocal counterpoint between Law and Morality). (shrink)

At the border between the fields of anthropology of theatre and phenomenology, this article presents and analyses the answers given by a sample of French theatre actors to an apparently simple question: How would you define your art? One could have been expect a wide range of answers, which would have reflected the infinite multiplicity of perspectives about that subject. Yet unexpectedly, the author deduces from the field investigation she conducted, a common and almost consensual vision of theatre expressed by (...) these actors: an art in which practitioners are in the poetic quest of themselves, in their most accomplished humanity, in harmony with the self, the Other and the life. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that if we understand Levinas’s Desire of the Other as gift, we can understand it as joyful—that is, as celebratory. After presenting Levinas’s conception of Desire, I consider his claim, found in Otherwise than Being, that the self is a hostage to the Other, and I contend that, paradoxical as it may seem, being a hostage to the Other is actually liberating. Then, drawing on insights Richard Kearney offers in Reimagining the Sacred, I argue for (...) understanding Desire as a gift that is the condition of possibility for joy. If I offer hospitality to the Other, I thereby accept the gift that makes joy possible, and this joy is not egoistic but is the proper response to the gift. Finally, I ask whether Desire can be joyful in practice, given that the pure gift is an originary condition and never a historical one, and I conclude that imperfect joy remains possible. Moreover, this imperfect joy is better than any solitary enjoyment I might experience in the total absence of the Other. (shrink)

En el siguiente texto intentaremos elucidar la particular estructura social, que define la utopía en el pensamiento de Lévinas, enfatizando su antagonismo estructural con la forma social propia de la estructura totalitaria. Es nuestro interés el argumentar aquí, que la utopía levinasiana en cuanto forma social, se fundamenta sobre la matriz de la "separación intersubjetiva", y que bajo este respecto ella aparece como una dimensión radicalmente opuesta a la estructura social del totalitarismo, en donde la "separación intersubjetiva" es imposible. De (...) una a la otra, el ser social se juega como separación, o bien, como aglutinación; mientras la utopía separa, el totalitarismo fusiona. Nuestro acercamiento será articulado con elementos de análisis aportados por el contundente trabajo de Miguel Abensour respecto a la utopía. Por ello, asumimos como nuestra la perspectiva de análisis críticopolítica de nuestro autor, según la cual, la crítica al totalitarismo resulta determinante para el despeje de la dimensión utópica. This articule attemps to clarify the unique social structure, which defines utopia in Levinas's thought, emphasizing its structural antagonism to the social form of the totalitarian structure. We argue that Levinasian utopia, as social form, is founded on the matrix of the "intersubjective separation". Hence, under this relation, the Levianasian utopia appears as a dimension that is radically opposed to the social structure of totalitarianism, where the "intersubjective separation" is impossible. The social being of utopia in Levinas is separation, whereas in totalitarianism the social being is agglutination. While the utopia separates the totalitarianism fuses together. Our approach will be supported with analytical elements drawn from Miguel Abensour's work about utopia. Thus, we assume Miguel Abensour's critical-political perspective of analysis as our own; consequently the critique of totalitarianism is determinant for the clearing of the utopian dimension. (shrink)