Theodicy, the enterprise of searching for greater goods that might plausibly justify God’s permission of evil, is often criticized on the grounds that the project has systematically failed to unearth any such goods. But theodicists also face a deeper challenge, one that places under question the very attempt to look for any morally sufficient reasons God might have for creating a world littered with evil. This ‘anti-theodical’ view argues that theists (and non-theists) ought to reject, primarily for moral reasons, the (...) project of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’. Unfortunately, this view has not received the serious attention it deserves, particularly in analytic philosophy of religion. Taking my cues from such anti-theodicists as Kenneth Surin, D.Z. Phillips and Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, I defend several reasons for holding that the way of thinking about God and evil enshrined in theodical discourse can only add to the world’s evils, not remove or illuminate them. (shrink)

This article considers a selection of Chris Marker's films in the context of noted differences between Emmanuel Levinas's and Jacques Derrida's positions on the animal as Other, the potential for the animal face. Derrida (2008) himself argues that Levinas ‘did not make the animal anything like a focus of interrogation within his work’ (p. 105). Statements such as this about Levinas's ethics seem to make his position clear. In contrast, Derrida's thinking on the matter of the animal, and in particular (...) human responsibility for them as Other, stands as a thorough and influential body of ethical thought, probing the limited and limiting boundary between human and animal. His autobiographical texts, according to Lynn Turner (2015, p. 135), welcome animal others. Marker's images, I will argue, address an equity between species through what he refers to as the égalité du regard, an equality in the gaze (of the camera). These images speak to a space beyond themselves and it is within this territory, I will argue, that the animal does have a face, that can occur via that of the human. (shrink)

This paper brings Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas into dialogue through a consideration of the notion of the spirit of abstraction in Marcel and the notion of the infinitely different other in Levinas. We abstract meaning from Mona Lisa‘s smile from her physical portrait. It is appropriate to abstract from the baby‘s sound whether he or she seems to be happy or sad, but it is when we begin to abstract humans from their humanity that the spirit of abstraction is (...) engaged. My thesis is that the spirit of abstraction is a form of cognitively dislocated reason. This cognitive dislocation begins with the idea that people can be abstracted into characteristics and traits and that these traits can be assigned arbitrary superiority or inferiority e.g., big nosed people have superior intellects; small nosed people do not. Marcel suggests that the spirit of abstraction can turn persons into impersonal targets that are accorded fewer or reduced rights as if they were other than other human. The result can be that inferior persons are accorded one set of rights and superior persons are accorded another set of rights. A most drastic form of the spirit of abstraction occurred during the Holocaust, when the Nazis dehumanized the Jews. Drawing on the work of Robert Solomon, I suggest that if we begin to understand that reason and passion are interchangeable, we can stand back to reconsider attitudes that produce arbitrary abstractions. The spirit of abstraction is cognitively dissociated reason because it redirects someone from the self-evident notion that this other is human, to this other is other-than-human, and even less-than-human because of some arbitrary condition, e.g., being small nosed.ion is a necessary intellectual exercise to achieve what one intends—differentiating an edible mushroom from one that is poisonous by its color. The spirit of abstraction, on the other hand, is cognitively dislocated reason because it is a form of expediency that pre-categorizes persons without considering the individual who, for example, stands before me. What Marcel and Levinas ultimately ask us to do is to recognize this cognitively dislocated reason and turn the discourse from abstracting humans into categories deserving of different human rights toward a conversation that asks which human rights should apply to all humans. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas’s work seemingly places a great emphasis on language leading some commentators towards a Kantian reading of him where moral consideration would be based on the moral patient’s capacity for reason with language functioning as a proxy for this. Although this reading is possible, a closer look at Levinas’s descriptions of language reveal that its defining characteristic is not reason but the capacity to express beyond any thematized contents we would give to the Other. This expressivity (which Levinas calls (...) face) would confront me with their singularity, infinity, and interiority tying me to them in a relation of responsibility. And the “content” of such an expression is a vulnerability and exposure tied to their mortality which continually entreats me though I cannot take it away. It is by means of this bare expression of an exposure to death as the core of language that it will become possible for non-human mortal beings to have what Levinas calls language. This possibility, although not explicitly addressed by Levinas, is at least left open by his account of Bobby the dog as well as his agnosticism over a snake’s face. (shrink)

Given that one-million species are currently threatened with extinction and that humans are undermining the entire natural infrastructure on which our modern world depends (IPBES, 2019), this dissertation will show that there is a need to provide an alternative approach to wildlife conservation, one that avoids anthropocentrism and wildlife valuation on an instrumental basis to provide meaningful and tangible success for both wildlife conservation and human well-being in an inclusive way. In this sense, The Value of Being Wild will showcase (...) the concept of eco-phenomenology as an important non-anthropocentric alternative to the current approach to wildlife conservation, namely sustainable development. The problem with this dominant paradigm, as Chapter Two will reveal, is that sustainable development has not only failed to provide humans and future generations of humans with their own needs but, as per the latest IPBES report, failed in arresting the freefall decline of wild species. The situation currently requires a radical overhaul of the current system. As emerged from the later work of French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), eco-phenomenology is particularly well-suited as a practical alternative to sustainable development. The core reason is that eco-phenomenology moves away from a human-centred framework toward a far more inclusive approach that embraces the conservation of wild animals as well the wild environment they dwell in, beyond any human needs (although humans are embraced within the approach too). Merleau-Ponty helps us to move away from anthropocentrism to a more inclusive approach in conserving wildlife, since his phenomenology does not consider the human animal’s relationship in the world as exclusive (to use and exploit wild animals solely for their benefit), but inclusive (as an interconnected biological component in a broad ecological system). The strength of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of phenomenology is that it facilitates an understanding of all living and even non-living entities, such as air, water and soil, as interconnected and interrelated within a broad biosphere. While Merleau-Ponty did not address the concept of wild animals or the biosphere directly, his later work points to the fact that human animals cannot exist outside a world that provides life-giving force to all living beings. Phenomenology, as developed by Merleau-Ponty, is a concept that recognises the axiological qualities of the natural world are inherent and ineliminable from the discipline of traditional phenomenology, hence the term ‘eco-phenomenology’, developed in one reception of his thinking. Eco-phenomenology offers a return to a world that humans have tried hard to alienate themselves from, in that it approaches the natural environment and wild animals, not as a complex set of objects and objective processes, but rather as they are experienced and lived from within by the attentive animal who is entirely a part of the world that he or she experiences. Merleau-Pontian eco-phenomenology thus emphasises a holistic dialogue within a more-than-human world (Abram, 1996: 65). Eco-phenomenology is a concept that points toward an applied strategy but so far this has not been attempted in earnest. This is specifically true when it comes to wildlife conservation. The Value of Being Wild, therefore, sets out to employ the concept of eco-phenomenology in order to provide a new practical wildlife conservation approach that challenges, and potentially replaces, the current prevailing policies as employed by global governmental and inter-governmental agencies. In particular, this alternative frame is posed as a replacement for the failing anthropocentric conservation practices currently in place in South Africa. This dissertation will therefore conclude by exploring strategies where conservation of wildlife is not taken as instrumentally-valued, or even intrinsically-valued, but rather as wild-valued in that the existence of wild animals as wild is conserved within a broader, more inclusive overall ecology that supports the survival and flourishing of all living beings that include plants, wild animals and human beings. (shrink)

While Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of alterity has been the topic of much discussion within Beauvoir scholarship, feminist theory, and social and political philosophy, it has not commonly been a reference point for those working within ethics. However, Beauvoir develops a novel view that those concerned with the ethical import of respect for others should consider seriously, especially those working within the Levinasian tradition. I claim that Beauvoir distinguishes between two forms of otherness: namely, existential alterity and sociopolitical alterity. While (...) sociopolitical alterity is a contingent and surmountable form of otherness that results from oppression of individuals and groups, existential alterity is a necessary feature of the human condition that discloses the foreignness of the other as a freedom. Out of this view of existential alterity, I argue, Beauvoir develops an ethic of asymmetrical reciprocity. In contrast with Levinas, who dismisses reciprocity as a symmetrical or reversible model of relation that minimizes difference, Beauvoir promulgates a view of reciprocity that does not fall into the problems that Levinas diagnoses. Moreover, asymmetrical reciprocity more successfully figures the ethical relation to the other than the absolute asymmetry one finds in Levinas, which becomes evident through revisiting Levinas’s account of eros and contrasting it with that of Beauvoir. (shrink)

The problem of artificial intelligence and human being has always raised questions about possible interactions among them and possible effects yielded by the introduction of such un-human subject. Dreyfus deeply connects intelligence and body based on a phenomenological viewpoint. Thanks to his reading of Merleau-Ponty, he clearly stated that an intelligence must be embodied into a body to function. According to his suggestion, any AI designed to be human-like is doom to failure if there is no tight bound with a (...) human-like body. Today, we are facing the pervasive introduction of robots into our everyday life, and the problem of this co-existence raises again with new vigor since they are not mere speculations, but there are already products sold to the public. We will highlight how vulnerability has to be taken into consideration in the design of robots to create entities which are able to relate to human beings taking into consideration mainly the positions of Sartre, Habermas, Levinas, and Marleau-Ponty. A first part will focus on the vulnerability of the robots. Robots are going to be among us, but a real interaction is possible only the moment they have a “same” body of ours. Therefore, only through the realization of a “fragile” body we can achieve a cohabitation between equals. Thanks to Merleau-Ponty we will show how the vulnerability of a body is one of the most important element to found any social interaction. The second part will focus on how the robots will affect the vulnerability of the human subjects. To produce vulnerable robots is not a mere neutral introduction, but it shapes how the subjects are constituted. Thanks to Levinas, we will study how the vulnerable robots will shape the subjects. Thanks to Sartre, we will show how the creation of a different gaze in the robot changes the vulnerabilities of the human subjects. Introducing vulnerable robots is a way to shape ourselves. (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)

Despite their many similarities, one apparent difference between the ethics of K.E. Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas concerns trust: Levinas does not analyse trust as a morally significant phenomenon, whereas Løgstrup makes it a central component of his moral phenomenology. This paper argues that an analysis of Løgstrupian trust nonetheless reveals at least three important commonalities between Levinas and Løgstrup’s moral projects: an understanding of war and ethics as metaphysical opposites; an emphasis on openness to the other as something that transcends (...) the prudential order of norms and laws; and a view of the ethical as that which breaks into and disrupts the order of human instrumental calculation. (shrink)

Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas are three of the most prominent Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. This paper looks at the different understandings each author offers of intersubjectivity and authentic self-hood and questions the extent to which for each author God plays a role in interpersonal relationships.

The singular ‘farm’ is increasingly a place of ever-greater multitudes, a deceptive and porous whole that is, in so many ways, very much less than the sum of its constituent parts. What might stand as a seemingly fixed entity or unit is, in reality, a constant flow and passage of multiple life ( zoe) and individual lives ( bios). To borrow from Heraclitus’ attributed aphorism, you can never really go into the same farm twice. Yet farms are, arguably, amongst the (...) most defining sites of contemporary human/animal relations. The vast majority of the 24 or so billion terrestrial farm animals that are kept and grown for human and other consumption at any one time do so on farms, with an increasing proportion of them on large scale, industrial farm units. Here is where kingdoms most emphatically meet, collide, intertwine, entangle, respond: the sovereign and the beast, the beast and the sovereign. Three questions: who meets who on the farm, what do they meet, and how does such meeting matter? (shrink)

In this essay we reflect critically on how animal ethics, and in particular thinking about moral standing, is currently configured. Starting from the work of two influential “analytic” thinkers in this field, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, we examine some basic assumptions shared by these positions and demonstrate their conceptual failings—ones that have, despite efforts to the contrary, the general effect of marginalizing and excluding others. Inspired by the so-called “continental” philosophical tradition , we then argue that what is needed (...) is a change in the rules of the game, a change of the question. We alter the normative question from “What properties does the animal have?” to “What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?” This leads us to consider the role of language, personal relations, and material-technological contexts. What is needed then in response to the moral standing problem, is not more of the same—yet another, more refined criterion and argumentation concerning moral standing, or a “final” rational argumentation that would be able to settle the animal question once and for all—but a turning or transformation in both our thinking about and our relations to animals, through language, through technology, and through the various place-ordering practices in which we participate. (shrink)

Abstract The philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari and Levinas are taken up in an effort to advance the ethical, political, and technological implications of how we interpret, inhabit, and territorialize the Earth. The difference between their views on the relation between immanence and transcendence and their respective analyses of the face and faciality are brought to bear in addressing the questions of ethics, politics, and values in relation to the constitution and liberation, or resingularization, of subjectivity. The contemporary world has produced (...) to a historically unprecedented degree a tension between machinization and wildness—both of which are expressions of the inhuman. Somewhere in between this difference, transversing the borderlines between the human and inhuman, lies a possible way for rethinking the relation between subjectivity, identity, difference, and singularity. (shrink)

The world is suffering from a dearth of health care workers, and sub-Saharan Africa, an area of great need, is experiencing the worst shortage. Developed countries are making the problem worse by luring health care workers away from the countries that need them most, while developing countries do not have the resources to stem the flow or even replace those lost. Postmodern philosopher Emmanuel Levinas offers a unique ethical framework that is helpful in assessing both the irresponsibility inherent in the (...) current global health care situation and the responsibility and obligation held by the stakeholders involved in this global crisis. Drawing on Levinas’ exploration of individual freedom and self-pursuit, infinite responsibility for the Other, and the potential emergence of a just community, we demonstrate its effectiveness in explaining the health care worker crisis, and we argue in favor of a variety of policy and development assistance measures that are grounded in an orientation of non-indifference toward Others. (shrink)

Abstract In this essay I show that while Levinas himself was clearly reluctant to extend to nonhuman animals the same kind of moral consideration he gave to humans, his ethics of alterity is one of the best equipped to mount a strong challenge to the traditional view of animals as beings of limited, if any, moral status. I argue that the logic of Levinas's own arguments concerning the otherness of the Other militates against interpreting ethics exclusively in terms of human (...) interests and values, and, furthermore, that Levinas's phenomenology of the face applies to all beings that can suffer and are capable of expressing that suffering to me. Insofar as an animal has a face in Levinas's sense through which it is able to express its suffering to me, then there is no moral justification for refusing to extend to it moral consideration. 1. (shrink)

According to Levinas, the history of western philosophy has routinely ‘assimilated every Other into the Same’. More concretely stated, philosophers have neglected the ethical significance of other human beings in their vulnerable, embodied singularity. What is striking about Levinas’ recasting of ethics as ‘first philosophy’ is his own relative disregard for non-human animals. In this article I will do two interrelated things: (1) situate Levinas’ (at least partial) exclusion of the non-human animal in the context of his markedly bleak conception (...) of ‘the state of nature’, and (2) drawing on Orwell, Wittgenstein and Gaita, argue that, despite his more positive evaluation of animality (specifically a dog named Bobby), Levinas is guided by a number of anthropomorphic prejudices; not least that the epithet ‘the animal’ can be used in the general singular. (shrink)

In "Culture and Value" Wittgenstein remarks that the truly "religious man" thinks himself to be, not merely "imperfect" or "ill," but wholly "wretched." While such sentiments are of obvious biographical interest, in this paper I show why they are also worthy of serious philosophical attention. Although the influence of Wittgenstein's thinking on the philosophy of religion is often judged negatively (as, for example, leading to quietist and/or fideist-relativist conclusions) I argue that the distinctly ethical conception of religion (specifically Christianity) that (...) Wittgenstein presents should lead us to a quite different assessment. In particular, his preoccupation with the categorical nature of religion suggests a conception of "genuine" religious belief which disrupts both the economics of eschatological-salvationist hope, and the traditional ethical precept that "ought implies can." In short, what Wittgenstein presents is a sketch of a religion without recompense. (shrink)

Background With an increasing older population, the pressure on home care resources is growing, which makes it important to ensure the maintenance of quality care. It is known that compassion and ethical sensitivity can improve the quality of care, but little is known about care leaders’ perceptions on ethical sensitivity and compassion in home care and how it is associated with staff competence and thus quality of care. Aim The aim of the study was to explore home care leaders’ perceptions (...) of ethical sensitivity and compassion associated with care quality in home care. Research design, participants, and research context A hermeneutical approach with a qualitative explorative design was used. The data consists of texts from 10 in-depth interviews with home care leaders. Content analysis was used as a method. Ethical considerations The study was conducted following the ethical guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and the Finnish Advisory Board of Research Ethics. Research ethics permission was applied for from a Research Ethics Board. Findings One overall theme and four subthemes were found. The overall theme was: “Compassion provides deeper meaning and ethical sensitivity provides means for knowing how to act”. Discussion If nurses fail to be sensitive and compassionate with patients, good and high qualitative home care cannot be achieved. Ethical sensitivity and compassion can be seen as resources in home care but the organization and the care leaders need to provide the support for these to develop. Conclusion This study provides an understanding of the meaning of ethical sensitivity and compassion as sources of strength and their link to quality of care in a home care context. Further studies could focus on how to build compassion and ethical sensitivity into home-based care and how to ensure adequate support for healthcare professionals’ compassion and ethical sensitivity. (shrink)

The theory of technological mediation aims to take technological artifacts seriously, recognizing the constitutive role they play in how we experience the world, act in it, and how we are constituted as (moral) subjects. Its quest for a compatible ethics has led it to Foucault’s “care of the self,” i.e., a transformation of the self by oneself through self-discipline. In this regard, technologies have been interpreted as power structures to which one can relate through Foucaultian “technologies of the self” or (...) ascetic practices. However, this leaves unexplored how concrete technologies can actuallysupportthe process of self-care. This paper explores this possibility by examining one such technology: a gamified To-Do list app. Doing so, it first shows that despite the apparent straightforwardness of gamification, confrontation and shame play an important role in how the app motivates me to do better. Second, inspired by Ihde’s schema of human-technology relations, it presents different ways in which the app may confront me with myself. Subsequently, it accounts for the motivation and shame that this technologically mediated confrontation with myself invokes through a Levinasian account of ethical subjectivity. In so doing, it also shows how Levinas’ phenomenology implies a responsibility for self-care and how nonhuman, technological others may still call me to responsibility. It concludes with a reflection on the role of gamification in technologically mediated subjectivation and some implications for design. (shrink)

Breastfeeding has become a subject of moral concern as its benefits have become well known. Encouraging mothers to breastfeed has been the goal of extensive public health promotion efforts. Emmanuel Levinas makes absolute responsibility to the Other central to his ethics, with giving food to the Other the paradigmatic ethical act. However, Levinas also provides an important critique of the autonomous individual who is taken for granted by breastfeeding promotion efforts. I argue that the ethical obligation to feed the hungry (...) child must be recognized as coextensive with meeting the needs of women, especially given the current absence of important social and economic supports for breastfeeding. Under a Levinasian framework, each of us is ethically responsible for feeding children; this responsibility is not limited to mothers. This ethical responsibility needs to be expressed through improving social and economic supports necessary for those individuals who wish to breastfeed, instead of attempting to convince women to breastfeed. This ethical responsibility must also be understood in a broader context of a politics of hunger, which provides access to quality food for all, and goes beyond mere nutrition to include the importance of culture, touch, and intimacy in the enjoyment of food—what Levinas calls “good soup.”. (shrink)

Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas are three of the most prominent Jewish philosophers of the 20thcentury. This paper looks at the different understandings each author offers of intersubjectivity and authentic self-hood and questions the extent to which for each author God plays a role in interpersonal relationships.

Ten years after the publication of the special issue of Social Epistemology on feminist epistemology, this paper explores recent feminist interest in the inhuman. Feminist science studies, cultural studies, philosophy and environmental studies all build on the important work feminist epistemology has done to bring to the fore questions of feminist empiricism, situated knowledges and knowing as an intersubjective activity. Current research in feminist theory is expanding this epistemological horizon to consider the possibility of an inhuman epistemology. This paper explores (...) these developments through the subject of waste. Waste, as both an epistemological and material phenomenon, invites timely questions about possibilities for acknowledging an inhuman epistemology. These questions appear to be particularly urgent from an environmental perspective. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) presents a sustained reflection on a concept of ‘the animal’ that has underpinned the work of much of the philosophical tradition. Based on a series of lectures originally presented in 1997 Derrida's speculation on the question of the animal was thus written at a time when Derrida's thought was often turned to the motif of ‘to-come’ (see Derrida 1992; 1994) such that one may wonder at the apparent evasion, both in Derrida's (...) text and in its subsequent review, of the chance to think the two themes together, in the guise of ‘the animal-to-come’. Picking up on Derrida's asides on the verb ‘to follow’, this discussion considers what it might mean to follow, ‘methodically’ perhaps, the thought of ‘the animal-to-come’? What problems might it help to bring into focus and what forces and lineages may yet bear upon its very thought? And where in our thinking goes the animal if it is to remain always to come? (shrink)

: The main threads of Emmanuel Levinas's theory of ethics, developed in his philosophical works, Totality and Infinity (1969), and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998), instruct that ethics require transcendence of being and nature, which he describes in terms of a transcendence of animality to the human. This apparent devaluation of the nonhuman would seem to preclude the development of Levinasian environmental ethics. However, a deconstructive reading of Levinas recognizes a subtext that interrupts the main threads of his (...) argument running against the inclusion of nonhuman others in ethics. Through a critical reconstructive reading of Levinas, I develop an ethic extraneous to Levinas's transcendent ethics, an ethic outside his "otherwise than being.". (shrink)

Resumen: El propósito de este artículo es exponer la tesis levinasiana de la inevitabilidad de lo dicho, teniendo como trasfondo algunas cuestiones epistemológicas que suscita. Para esto, se comienza presentando la contraposición que establece Levinas entre verdad del desvelamiento y verdad del testimonio, destacando sus diferencias más radicales. Posteriormente, teniendo la subjetividad como hilo conductor, se reconstruye el camino que relacionaría ambos tipos de verdad, mostrando cómo la tesis de la inevitabilidad de lo dicho adquiere relevancia en las discusiones epistemológicas. (...) Finalmente, se concluye sugiriendo algunos aportes de esta reflexión para las consideraciones acerca de una racionalidad renovada.: This paper discusses the Levinasian thesis of the inevitability of the Said, having as its background certain epistemological issues arising from that thesis. I begin by showing the contraposition between truth of disclosure and truth of testimony, as Levinas defines them, and point out the most radical differences between the two. I then reconstruct, with subjectivity as the connecting thread, a way of relating both kinds of truth, showing how the thesis on the inevitability of the Said is relevant to epistemological discussions. I conclude by suggesting some considerations with regard to a renewed rationality. (shrink)

Given present criticisms of contemporary education and leadership practices, this article investigates the ways in which the basic concepts of state freedom and bureaucracy stifle ethics and social justice in educational leadership practices through the philosophical framework of Emmanuel Levinas. By investigating Levinas’ ‘an-archy’, the definition of ethics and justice in school leadership can be reframed towards responsibility to otherness rather than individual freedom. The anarchical ethic of pure responsibility to the Other suggests that educational leaders should prioritize specific acts (...) of responsibility over general actions based on the assumptions of traditional state education. Aspects of transactional, transformational, and social justice leadership are critiqued from this perspective. (shrink)

What makes us think, and what makes us think as feminists? In seeking to answer these questions, this paper draws on both Deleuze and Guattari's account of the creation of concepts, and feminist thought on feminist thinking, before suggesting with Levinas that our relation to ideas is primarily affective. Via further engagement with Levinas, I argue that it is the relation to the other which provokes and produces thought; models of autonomous theorizing are thereby supplanted by the teaching of the (...) other. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that modernism in the arts might have in articulating the uselessness and incomprehensibility of physical and mental suffering. It is argued that the experience of illness is frequently resistant to interpretation, and as such, it will be suggested, to conventional forms of artistic expression and communication. Conventional narratives, and other beautiful or conventionally expressive aesthetic structures, that presuppose the possibility and desirability of an harmonious and meaningful resolution to conflicts and (...) tensions, may fundamentally misrepresent the patient
s experience. By drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas (on useless suffering) and the aesthetic theories of Nietzsche and T. W. Adorno, it will be argued first that a faith in the possibility of harmonious resolution of suffering is misplaced and does violence to the experience of suffering. Second, it will be argued that the expression of suffering lies not in finding words, images or sounds that communicate the experience of that suffering to others, but rather in the persistent and radical disruption of any illusion of meaning and coherence that might be imposed upon the experience, so that the very possibility of communication is also disrupted. (shrink)

Adopting Kantor’s Masochean turn within Levinas, this article challenges the anthropocentrically limited purview of Levinas’s ethical relation. Incorporating Kantor’s legalistic reading of Levinas, informed through his literary analysis of Sacher-Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’, the article details the inescapable, legalistic plight that is to be the Levinasian ethical subject. Extending upon Kantor’s introductory conceptualisation of the Levinasian subject through Masoch, reveals a subject for whom suffering and sacrifice must be embraced; necessary acts of penitence before an irrepressible Other who they adore. (...) The Other is presented through Masoch’s text as an insatiable, inescapable deity of Law who cannot be refused and demands subservience. A god manifest in Exteriority whose influence upon the subject extends beyond the frame of the interhuman relation and is a necessary component of the subject’s existence and, more broadly, their world. The Levinasian subject’s relation with alterity poetically portraying all the potency, affirmation and urgency of dear Severin’s with his Venus, a relation which destroys, haunts and affirms the subject completely as only Law can. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of messianic thought on political philosophy in the theory of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s work enables us to consider the political not only in terms of contemplation of the tension between the political and the ethical and of the ethical limits of politics but as an attempt to create ethical political thought. Discussion of the tension between the political and the ethical intensifies in wartime and in the context of militaristic thinking. At the same time, (...) it lends itself to new meanings of peace. At the heart of this article lies an examination of the role of the political discourse articulated in Levinas’s influential work Totality and Infinity and of the possibility of understanding this discourse in light of the Levinasian reading of the Talmud. (shrink)

In this article, using the example of koalas in the 2019–20 bushfires, I argue that our embodied encounters with animals are conditioned by an ethical address that can be found in and outside of language, which demands a fostering of life which must be environmental as well as physical. I posit that animals do have a face in the sense that Levinas has given us, and that our ethical responses should move beyond a narrowly defined mourning into a broader acknowledgment (...) of the manifold ways that human economies are fuelling the sixth mass extinction of all kinds of animals, not just koalas. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Fagan's argument that Levinas's attempt to build an ethics, separated from politics, is misconceived. I take issue with her claim that the separation is untenable because the Third is always present in the encounter with the Other. I maintain that this conclusion fails to appreciate Levinas's attempt to resolve the apparent contradictions in his greatest work, Otherwise than Being. My approach, consciously in the Levinasian tradition, is elliptical in the sense that I seek not (...) simply to explain why her thesis is a misreading of his thinking but to demonstrate why the separation of ethics from politics is essential to it. Levinas's quest for an unproblematized ethics is a response to the collapse of belief in a transcendental deity, an inevitable outcome of the Shoah, and leads him to locate the divine in the face of the Other. This has to be a solitary encounter, a dyadic relation of Self to the Other, as the pre-cognitive genesis of ethics that accords precedence of the Good over the classical philosophical obsession with the True. (shrink)

Across four decades of writing, Levinas repeatedly referred to the Holocaust as ‘the Passion of Israel at Auschwitz’. This deliberately Christological interpretation of the Holocaust raises questions about the respective roles of Judaism and Christianity in Levinas’ thought and seems at odds with his well-known view that suffering is ‘useless’. Basing my interpretation on the journals Levinas wrote as a prisoner of war and a radio talk he delivered in September 1945, I argue that his philosophical project is best understood (...) as an ontological rendering of Judaism that accounts for the opening or transcendence of sense and intelligibility. Judaism provides Levinas with a salient critique of liberal and idealist philosophies of the subject and an alternative to fundamental ontology. I show how Levinas’ account of the ‘Passion of Israel’ can be read within the exegetical history of Jewish accounts of divine suffering and thereby effects a reversal of the Christian typological gaze. I conclude by suggesting that Levinas’ recourse to Judaism as a philosophical category does not assume a dogmatic origin to philosophy but ‘formally indicates’, in the Heideggerian sense, the phenomenological origins of normativity. In this respect, the ‘Passion of Israel’ involves not only a reversal of the Christian typological gaze but also a deconstruction of Judaism. (shrink)

(2013). BOBBY BETWEEN DELEUZE AND LEVINAS, OR ETHICS BECOMING-ANIMAL. Angelaki: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 105-126.

My starting point in this article is that investigating the ethics of autonomous vehicles through the lens of the trolley problem is not only limited but also unethical. I construct my case by aligning myself with Niklas Toivakainen, who argues against David Gunkel’s reading of Levinasian ethics as an answer to the “Machine Question”. I adumbrate Toivakainen’s critique that the attempt to give a Levinasian face to the machine is an example of a compensatory logic – a way to avoid (...) a deeper exploration of the moral dynamics from which our technologies emerge. I offer an extended reading of Levinas’s formulation of the face of the other to argue that while the machine cannot signify as a face, the machine can announce or anticipate the signification of the face which the self is infinitely responsible to. I reach this conclusion through focusing on the uncertainty and ambiguity of the signification of the face. I then argue that current approaches to the ethics of autonomous vehicles, based on variations of the trolley problem, fail to locate ethical responsibility to the other, precisely in its attempts to evade uncertainty. I demonstrate how an embrace of uncertainty can make the ethics of autonomous vehicles more ethical through a consideration of the concept of shared space and naked streets in the work of the late Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. (shrink)

Notwithstanding the burgeoning literature on death, philosophers have tended to focus on the significance death has (or ought/ought not to have) for the one who dies. Thus, while the relevance one's own death has for others (and the significance others' deaths have for us) is often mentioned, it is rarely attributed any great importance to the purported real philosophical issues. This is a striking omission, not least because the deaths of others - and the anticipated effects our own death will (...) have on those we leave behind - are normally of great importance outside the confines of academic philosophy. In this paper I want to do three things: (i) argue that philosophers' treatment of death tends to distort the issue (Sections I-111); (ii) outline some of the ways others' deaths figure in how we assess our own mortality (Sections IV-V); and (iii) raise some general questions about the value of 'theorising' death (Section VI). (shrink)

This article provides a critical review of literature on ‘social suffering’. Analytical attention is focused upon the ways in which writers struggle to bring ‘meaning’ to this topic. All sense that there is always something in events of extreme suffering that resists conceptualisation and defies analysis. This problem of establishing a language for ‘thinking with suffering’ is explored with reference to the works of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur and Max Weber. An agenda for sociological research is proposed which focuses on (...) the struggle to make sense out of the phenomenon of suffering as a force of cultural innovation. In this context, it is suggested that what is most interesting here is the evidence to suggest that, when faced with the ‘brute fact’ of a world where there appears to be too much suffering, people are always moved to make this phenomenon productive for thought and action. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between language, subjectivity and teaching in Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. It aims to elucidate Levinas’s presentation of language as always already predicated on a relationship of responsibility towards that which is beyond the self and the idea that it is only in this condition of being responsible that we are subjects. Levinas suggests that the relation with the Other through which I am a subject as one uniquely responsible is also the scene of teaching. (...) Through examining these ethical conditions of subjectivity, I suggest that this notion of the self as oriented towards the Other in a relation of passivity presents a challenge to many of the standard topoi of teaching and learning and invites us to consider the nature of teaching in a provocative new manner. (shrink)

Increased global attention to early childhood education and care in the past two decades has intensified attention on the education of infants and assessment of their learning in education policy. This interest is particularly evident in the focus upon infants in the early childhood curriculum frameworks developed in recent years in many countries. To date, there has been little examination of implications of this policy/curriculum emphasis in relation to its possible implications for how infants are understood. In this article, using (...) Levinas’ notion of ethical encounter, we present a critical reading of curriculum for infants. Drawing on his ideas of the ‘Other’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘unknowability’ we argue that the rapidly growing corpus of knowledge about infants and their inclusion in education policy and curricula texts, has the potential to narrowly define educators’ responsibilities and prescribe pedagogies in ways that may have unintended consequences. Using the Australian National Quality Framework (NQF) and its associated Early Years Learning Framework as examples, this article highlights the tensions inherent in a system that aims to provide equity, consistency and certainty, premised on a particular ‘knowing’ of the infant. We draw on Levinas’ ideas about ‘said’ and ‘saying’ to propose ways of working with policy and curricula texts that recognise that they can offer only partial understandings of the possibilities for infants’ learning. (shrink)

Many Levinasians are prone to merely assert or presuppose that the Other is ‘radically Other’, and that such Otherness is of patent ethical significance. But building ethics into the very concept of ‘the Other’ seems question-begging. What then, if not mere Otherness, might motivate Levinasian responsibility? In the following discussion I argue that this can best be answered by reading Levinas as a post-Holocaust thinker, preoccupied with how one’s simply being-here constitutes a ‘usurpation of spaces belonging to the other’. Then, (...) drawing on Schutz’s phenomenology, I explain how the resultant usurpatory bad conscience presupposes the embodied ‘interchangeability’ of self and Other. As such, one can be said to ‘usurp’ the Other’s place only insofar as self and Other are not radically different. (shrink)

Dans l'éthique d’Emmanuel Levinas, les animaux ne peuvent répondre à l’exigence éthique, pas plus qu’ils ne peuvent être l'Autre de qui l’exigence émane. La caractérisation de l’Autre en tant qu'humain opérée par Levinas semble être incompatible avec sa description d’Autrui comme infiniment transcendantal et avec sa conception du visage refusant d’être contenu. Un correctif peut être trouvé dans la version bidimensionnelle de la rencontre décrite par Martin Buber. Buber élargit le champ des entités avec lesquelles des rencontres moralement exigeantes sont (...) possibles. Compléter la version lévinassienne de la rencontre avec celle de Buber permet de reconnaître les animaux non humains en tant qu’Autres dans la rencontre morale. (shrink)

This essay examines one aspect of the wide-ranging philosophical background of the intellectual and dissident movement for human rights in one-time communist Czechoslovakia. I shall meditate on Jan Patočka 's finite responsibility, Derrida's aporetic emphasis on the infinite dimension of responsibility, and Lévinasian-Dostoyevskyan ethico-existential variations on in/finite responsibility. Havel alludes to hyperbolic ethics in a parenthetical remark on the birth of "Charta 77", the Manifesto for Human Rights in Czechoslovakia. The question before us is this: which dimension of responsibility appears (...) at this birth or, to put it otherwise, what responsibility is born in care for the soul and polis? (shrink)

This article seeks to reconsider how traditional notions of ethics-ethics that privilege reason, truth, meaning, and a fixed conception of "the human"-are upended by digital technology, cybernetics, and virtual reality. We argue that prevailing ethical systems are incompatible with the way technology refigures the concepts and practices of identity, meaning, truth, and finally, communication. The article examines how both ethics and technology repurpose the liberal humanist subject even as they render such a subject untenable. Such an impasse reformats the question (...) of ethics by introducing questions of radical alterity, making it possible for new ethical systems to emerge. (shrink)