Examines Jean-Paul Sartre’s antiracist politics and his contributions to critical race theories, postcolonialism, and Africana existentialism.

This thesis examines a specific type of instance that bridges the divide between seeing sacred texts as merely vehicles for content and as objects themselves: self-reference. Doing so yielded a heuristic system of categories of self-reference in sacred texts based on the way the text self-describes: Inlibration, Necessity, and Untranslatability. I provide examples of these self-referential features as found in various sacred texts: the Vedas, Āgamas, Papyrus of Ani, Torah, Quran, Sri Guru Granth Sahib, and the Book of Mormon. I (...) then examine how different theories of sacredness interact with them. What do Durkheim, Otto, Freud, or Levinas say about these? How are their theories changed when confronted with sacred texts as objects as well as containers for content? I conclude by asserting that these self-referential features can be seen as ‘self-sacralizing’ in that they: match understandings of sacredness, speak for themselves, and do not occur in mundane texts. (shrink)

The patient–physician relationship is of primary importance for medical ethics, but it also teaches broader lessons about ethics generally. This is particularly true for the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas whose ethics is grounded in the other who “faces” the subject and whose suffering provokes responsibility. Given the pragmatic, situational character of Levinasian ethics, the “face of the other” may be elucidated by an analogy with the “face of the patient.” To do so, I draw on examples from Martin Winckler’s fictional physician (...) narratives. In addition, I explore how the standpoint of the physician conceals a related but often unacknowledged dimension of care: the obligation to nurse. For both nurse and physician, one question encapsulates Levinas’ medical ethics: “What does the patient say?” Using this as my guiding question, I examine the context within which physician, nurse, and patient meet in order to highlight their shared vulnerability and the care relationship that binds them together. (shrink)

The idea of God in Levinas is resonant of the First Testament: a voice from higher above that clamors: Thou shall not kill; the unsettling call of the Infinite that commands us to leave the familiar towards the unknown, like “Abraham’s journey who left alone, towards all—from particularity to universality—under the threat of nights and the hope of days, in the words of Maurice Blanchot. Hard, long path of justice.”1 God in Levinas thus echoes the Kantian practical postulates, framing the (...) ethical injunction as both divine and unquestionable, and will constitute his answer to the imperative of Auschwitz. Though necessary, the law of the State is insufficient to resist the violence of tyranny. Ultimately, the sanction against murder is enforced by God, the Invisible made visible through the face of the Other. As such, justice for Levinas consists not only in serving the latter, but to do so unconditionally because he opens up to the divine. Ethics is thus articulated as the movement towards an Other who reveals an absolute difference alone capable of interrupting the homogenizing impulses of politics. (shrink)