In this paper I elaborate a notion of nurses’ professional self as one who is attracted towards intrinsic value. My previous work in 2003 has shown how nurses, who see intrinsic value in their work, experience self‐affirmation when they believe that they have made a difference to that which they see to have value. The aim of this work is to reveal a further aspect of nurses’ professional self. I argue that nurses’ desire towards that which they see to have (...) intrinsic value, is a necessary and self‐transcending aspect of a nurses’ professional self. I argue further that nurses’ desire towards intrinsic value inevitably involves their vulnerability. Nurses who see intrinsic value are shown to be vulnerable to self‐sacrifice in their inclination to work for the good of their patients, at the expense of themselves. Yet an ability to transcend their self in this way remains a necessary aspect of a nurse's professional self, which requires nurture and support through nurse education. (shrink)

The project of this thesis is to provide a novel reading of the work of Emmanuel Levinas to extract theoretical resources that can help address the numerous crises of the contemporary world. Beginning from the premise that the world is in a state of multiple crises and that current political groups and institutions are failing to find adequate responses, I argue that Levinas’ thought provides radically different, and often unsettling, contributions to these discussions. I first review the areas where Levinas (...) discusses the political and identify key dynamics in his work that can hinder its deployment and contribute to unhelpful readings. Following this with an examination of the secondary literature of this topic, I establish important parameters of the future course of the thesis. Recognising the limitations of Levinas, I nevertheless proceed with the main exposition of the thesis, which aims to extract what is of most value in Levinas’ work, aiming to maximise its utility in challenging the political structures which are currently falling short. The project then circles back to the limitations left unresolved earlier and through the intervention of other thinkers seeks to ameliorate these issues. The main conclusions are as follows: first, Levinas’ work on the political should be read as being torn between commitments to both transcendence and freedom, and a somewhat conservative approach to politics. Second, the most helpful approach is to strongly emphasise the radical and antiauthoritarian elements. Third, that the result of this reading leads to an anti-political position, or at least with a vision of politics so alien it is hardly recognised as such. Finally, while Levinas’ work has issues, particularly around race and colonialism, that cannot be simply resolved, it retains the capacity for compatibility with other thinkers who can address them more adequately. (shrink)

This article takes as its subject matter the juridico-political space of the prisoner of war (POW) camp. It sets out to determine the nature of this space by looking at the experience of war captivity by Jewish members of the Western forces in World War II, focusing on the experience of Emmanuel Levinas, who spent 5 years in German war captivity. On the basis of a historical analysis of the conditions in which Levinas spent his time in captivity, it argues (...) that the POW camp was a space of indifference that was determined by the legal exclusion of prisoners from both war and persecution. Held behind the stage of world events, prisoners were neither able to exercise their legal agency nor released from law into a realm of extra-legal violence. Through a close reading of Levinas’s early concept of the ‘there is’ [il y a], the article seeks to establish the impact on prisoners of prolonged confinement in such a space. It sets out how prisoners’ subjectivity dissolved in the absence of meaningful relations with others and identifies the POW camp as a space in which existence was reduced to indeterminate, impersonal being. (shrink)

The cinema of the Dardenne brothers represents a new kind of cinema, one that challenges a number of our conventional ways of thinking about the distinction between religion and secularism, belief and unbelief. Their films explore the intricacies of spiritual and ethical transformations as they are experienced within embodied, material life. These features of their cinema will be examined primarily through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the imbrication of the drama of existence and the ethical intrigue of self (...) and Other. The work of the Dardenne brothers can be understood as an attempt to express what I describe as a “faith without faith”—a recognition of the absolute centrality of belief for the development of a responsible subject but in the absence of a traditional faith in a personal deity. (shrink)

El presente reporte de investigación muestra, de manera sintética, los resultados de una pesquisa presentada en el 2012 para optar por el grado de Licenciatura en Docencia en la Universidad Estatal a Distancia. La exploración de los desafíos éticos en el contexto educativo costarricense desde el planteamiento de Martin Buber y Emmanuel Lévinas es lo que pretende formular la presente investigación, procurando aportar al diálogo nacional el insumo de un elemento filosófico innovador, tenor de un impulso en futuros planteamientos educativos (...) costarricenses que propicien un desarrollo humano cada vez más integral, donde la persona sea considerada en relación armónica con lo existente. Además, se presentan una serie de desafíos éticos que se desprenden de un análisis, en el cual confluyen diversas fuentes de información. La novedad radica en la confluencia de voces y la lectura ética de estos postulados desde el pensamiento de Martin Buber y Emmanuel Lévinas. La meta de la investigación postula un aporte al modelo educativo costarricense, así como a grupos gremiales de la educación y población en general, desde el enfoque de la filosofía del encuentro, desde el planteamiento del diálogo buberiano y el planteamiento de alteridad levinasiano, se puedan encontrar insumos necesarios para un replanteamiento -tanto desde el aspecto teórico como práctico- en el quehacer educativo nacional. (shrink)

The paper discusses a formation of the ethical body in Levinas’ philosophy. The central question is how different modalities of subjectivity, brought into light in face-to-face relation with the other, constitute a particular ethical and sensible embodiment. The main topics of the paper are caress, touch, and pain, and their role in constructing ethical embodiment. The focus is given to such existential modalities as being-in-one’s-own-skin, the-one-for-the-other and having-the-other-under-one’s-own-skin. The conceptual work of maternity and the feminine in the face-to-face situation accentuate (...) a meaning of responsive and responsible sensibility which Levinas reveals in his major works Otherwise than Being or Beyond the Essence and Totality and Infinity. (shrink)