This paper addresses a growing concern within the medical humanities community regarding the perceived need for a more empathically-focused medical curricula, and advocates for the use of creative pedagogical forms as a means to attend to issues of suffering and relationality. Drawing from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I critique the notion of empathy on the basis that it erases difference and disregards otherness. Rather, I propose that the concept of empathy may be usefully replaced with that of ethical (...) responsibility , which suggests a shared sense of humanity outside the boundaries of presumed knowledge of the other. To illustrate this argument, I theorize the importance of theater within medical education. Theater, I argue, may engender ethical responsibility in the Levinasian sense, and thus may allow learners to differently engage with the experience of the suffering other. As such, I examine Margaret Edson’s widely used play Wit as a platform for such an ethical encounter to occur. Thus, rather than working to understand the value of theater in medical education in terms of knowledge and skill acquisition, I theorize that its primacy within medical curricula arises from its ethical/relational potential , or potential to engender new forms of inter-human relationality. (shrink)

While much has been written about Levinas's conception of ethics, very little has been said about the connection between ethics and holiness in his work. Yet, throughout much of his corpus, Levinas consistently links the two. The first part of my article addresses the important distinction that Levinas establishes between the sacred (le sacré) and holiness (la sainteté). According to Levinas, several influential thinkers conflate these two categories. Holiness, Levinas suggests, represents a kind of antidote to the sacred. The second (...) part examines the various ways that holiness is manifest in ethicality. The key, I suggest, for properly understanding the link between ethical regard and sanctification revolves around an appreciation of Levinas's frequent appeal to the notion of straightforwardness (droiture). For Levinas, the complex relations that bind the self, Other, and God, involve essential conditions of rectitude and uprightness. (shrink)

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on‐going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida destabilizes fixed notions of the human subject and the institutions it founds . From Derrida's points of destabilization and through a differing but similar deconstructive stance, I also consider (...) Gayatri Spivak's suggestive question ‘Who is not the subject of humanism?’ to provide another possible trajectory for intervention that educators might take. Departing from knowledge‐based conceptions of human subjectivity, Spivak urges educators to respond to their students in meaningful encounter with the ‘Other’ while Derrida suggests human beings might begin the difficult and complex task of re‐envisioning an altered humanism, a humanism founded on the call of the Other in institutional sites like education. By an engaged rereading of the texts of human subjectivity upon which human beings are written and by turning to respond to the face of the human beings in and outside their classrooms as a means of encountering the Other's humanity, I suggest that educators be the catalyst for changing what it means to be human and education the means by which we approach a humanism yet to be. (shrink)

This special issue contains papers first presented at a conference that was held 14–16 May 2008 at the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the University of Leicester. Each of the papers takes up ideas from the works of Jacques Derrida and seeks to apply these to questions of business, ethics and business ethics. The papers take up quite different parts of Derrida's works, from his work on the animal, narrative and story, the violence of codification and the limits (...) of responsibility to the aporias of decision. As a whole, the papers offer a dangerous gift to business ethics, of which the stakes are here laid bare – if business ethics is to shrug off its philosophical immaturity and take seriously the work of major European thinkers such as Derrida, then many of its assumed categories, concepts and practices will be shown to shudder and tremble, as it becomes possible to demonstrate how they, one by one, unhinge themselves. (shrink)

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

Radical Orthodoxy, a growing movement among contemporary Christian theologians, argues that the prominent philosophical paradigms of modern and postmodern thought lack transcendence, are ultimately nihilistic, and are guided by an ontology of violence. Among the thinkers Radical Orthodoxy criticizes are Hegel, Nietzsche, and Hobbes, but surprisingly also the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whom they claim offers an ethics for nihilists. In this essay, I analyze the claims of two prominent thinkers in Radical Orthodoxy, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, and argue (...) that their account of Levinas is not only unfounded but point out the ways in which Levinas himself is also just as critical of the prevailing ontology of violence that figures in modern accounts of intersubjectivity and politics. Indeed, in his own way, Levinas also offers an ontology of peace, making him an important dialogue partner for Radical Orthodoxy's construction of an alternative ethics and politics. (shrink)

It is now almost 20 years since Janicaud’s critique of the ‘theological turn in French phenomenology’ (Janicaud 1991, 2000), with its emphasis on phenomenology and theology as two and never one. Yet since that time there been an explosion of phenomenologies which are, if not overtly, implicitly religious and phenomenology. Thus, we have phenomenologies of prayer, or love, or hope, and the possibilities of further phenomenologies. The challenge of these emerging phenomenologies is that there seems to be no noematic correlate (...) to a noesis in intentionality. To the fore in the reconsideration of this phenomenological challenge is Jean-Luc Marion (although there are others such as Levinas, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry): all aspects of lived experience appear now to belong to the proper scope of phenomenology. Marion considers the relation in Husserl between intentions and intuitions which fulfil these intentions, and suggests a reversal. In Marion, although intentionality is not rejected, the phenomenological flow which the reduction brings to light is from the object as such as it gives itself in intuition, and then from intuition to intention. For Marion, phenomena are saturated—they give too much. Religion becomes a test-case for all phenomenology. This bearing, drawing mainly on The Visible and the Revealed, offers some of the key things in Marion’s phenomenology. (shrink)

In Levinas’s early works, the ‘body as subjectivity’ is the focus of research bearing significant implications for his later philosophy of the body. How this is achieved becomes the thrust of this article. We analyze how the existent, through hypostasis, emerges hic et nunc, and explores further its effort to exist is effected in its relation to existence. In delineating this, we argue that the existent does not emerge from the il y a as an idealistic subject, but rather is (...) born as a natural subject. This is arguably the most remarkable aspect of Levinas’s analysis of the dawn of the bodily subject. However, the subjectivity of the subject is to be found in the inescapable self-possession of its embodiment. The body, in turn, is a conditional possibility for being a corporeal subject. We argue that the subject as a being in the flesh is the meaning of the embodied human subject, and it bears fertile implications for the ethical signification of the body. In re-conceiving the meaning of the ‘body as subjectivity’ to ‘ethical signification of the body’ against the odds of the traditional dichotomies, we argue that Levinas tries to overcome the bio-political understanding of racist conception of the body subject. Given this ethical meaning beyond materiality we reconsider how the embodied subject is a radical passivity as a ‘here I am’. In suggesting the implication of this claim with Levinas we find how the ethical subjectivity is beyond dualistic assertions and racist conceptions. (shrink)

Derrida's purpose in ‘Death Penalties’ (2004), is to show how both arguments in favour of capital punishment, exemplified by Kant's, and arguments for its abolition, such as those of Beccaria, are deconstructible. He claims that ‘never, to my knowledge, has any philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and systematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty.’ (2004, 146) Derrida also asks how it is possible ‘to abolish the death (...) penalty in a way that is based on principle, that is universal and unconditional, and not because it has become not only cruel but useless, insufficiently exemplary?’ (2004, 137) In my paper, I examine Derrida's claim about the lack of systematic opposition to the death penalty on the part of philosophers and suggest an answer to his question concerning the possibility of a universal and unconditional opposition to capital punishment. (shrink)

In the modern consideration of historical time, reason is the driving force of progress through a homogenous, linear and continuum time. In fact, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humanity was witnessing a history of progress in which it appeared that history was progressing towards a better world. However, the tragedies of the twentieth century indicate the opposite. Western reason proved unable to stop the barbarism of war. At the heart of this panorama, according to Emmanuel Levinas and Johann Baptist (...) Metz, was the idealism of the Greek logos presented in the philosophical and theological mode of thinking. Theology and philosophy would share in this way the same idealist vocation towards totality which, in Levinas’s categories, is the forgetting of singularity and their concrete situation in favour of universality. I will show how by resorting to the Jewish legacy, and particularly to the concepts of eschatology, apocalypse, and messianism, Levinas and Metz define a new relationship with historical time. In this way they not only oppose the mainstream consideration of history as a vector of continuous progress towards its own realization, but also introduce in history the contingency of individual experiences and particularly those of the victims of such history. (shrink)

This article explores the influence of Émile Durkheim on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in order both to open up the political significance of Levinas’s thought and to develop more expansive meanings of moral and political community within education. Education was a central preoccupation for both thinkers: Durkheim saw secular education as the site for promoting the values of organic solidarity, while Levinas was throughout his professional life engaged in debates on Jewish education and conceptualized ethical subjectivity as a condition (...) of being taught. Durkheim has been accused of dissolving the moral into the social, and his view of education as a means of imparting a sense of civic republican values is sometimes seen as conservative, while Levinas’s argument for an ‘unfounded foundation’ for morality is sometimes seen as paralyzing the impetus for concrete political action. Against these interpretations, I argue that their approaches present provocative challenges for conceptualizing the nature of the social, offering theoretical resources to deepen understanding of education as the site of an everyday ethics and a prophetic politics opening onto more compelling ideals for education than those dominant within standard educational discourses. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with aspects of responsibility in Norwegian public health nursing. Public health nursing is an expansive profession with diffuse boundaries. The Norwegian public health nurse does not perform ‘hands on’ nursing, but focuses on the prevention of illness, injury, or disability, and the promotion of health. What is the essence of ethical responsibility in public health nursing? The aim of this article is to explore the phenomenon based on the ethics of responsibility as reflected upon by the (...) philosopher Emanuel Levinas (1906–1995). From an ethical point of view, responsibility is about our duty towards the Other, a duty we have not always chosen, are prepared for, or can fully explain; but it is nevertheless a demand we have to live with. Interviews with five experienced Norwegian nurses provide the empirical base for reflection and interpretation. The nurses share stories from their practice. In interpreting the nurses’ stories, the following themes emerge: personal responsibility; boundaries; temporality; worry, fear, and uncertainty; and a sense of satisfaction. As the themes are developed further, it becomes apparent that, despite their diversity, they are all interrelated aspects of ethical responsibility. Responsibility for the Other cannot be avoided, ignored, or transferred. The nurses’ responsibility is personal and infinite. Levinasian ethics can help nurses understand the importance of accepting that being a responsive carer can involve not only contentment in the predictable, but also the fear, worry, and uncertainty of the unpredictable. (shrink)

This article investigates difficulties in defining the concept of God by focusing on the question of what it means to understand God as a ‘person.’ This question is explored with respect to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, in dialogue with Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. Thereby, the following three questions regarding divine ‘personhood’ come into view: First, how can God be a partner of dialogue if he at the same time remains unknown and unthinkable, a limit-concept of understanding? (...) Second, if God is love in person and at the same time a spiritual reality ‘between’ human agents, in what ways are his personal and trans-personal traits related to each other? Third, what exactly is revealed through God’s ‘name’? By way of an inconclusive conclusion, divine personhood is discussed in regard to prayer, where the problems of predication that arise in third-personal speech about God are linked with the second-personal encounter with God. (shrink)

Qualitative research methods in sport often advocate that to understand others, obtain significant knowledge and do ethically admirable research we should empathise with our participants by imagining being them. In philosophy, it is likewise often assumed that we can overcome differences between people through moral imagination: putting ourselves in the place of others, we can share their points of view, merge with them, and enter into their embodied worlds. Drawing partly on the view that imagination is embodied and the philosophy (...) of Bakhtin and Levinas, along with research on people's experiences of becoming disabled through playing sport, this paper problematises the assumption that we can imagine ourselves differently situated or being another person. It argues that our imagination and ability to put ourselves in the place of others is constrained partly by embodied experience and otherness. Some reflections on what this might mean for disability and sport research are then offered. (shrink)

Levinas himself raises the question: "why would I feel responsible in the presence of the Face" since "we are separate ontological beings?" This questions the character of our response to the other--both in terms of agency and motivation. While the general reception of Levinas's thought has focused on his description of us as "hostage"--that is, on the moment of assignation (or assignment) by the other--I suggest that Levinas himself also, though not as directly, addresses (as he needs to) the correlative (...) moment, the moment of response. My essay reconstructs Levinas's implicit understanding of the character of our initiative in the light of his concept of Desire. I explore the different dimensions of Desire as appetite and generosity, and I argue that the "transition to moral consciousness" that Levinas wants to "justify" is one from complacent happiness to "non-complacent happiness" and can be illuminated by the notion of "passion seeking its downfall.". (shrink)

This article explores the significance of the work of Emmanuel Levinas for the philosophy of religion. Levinas is well‐known as the philosopher of the face of the other which provokes infinite responsibility. In his account of ethical responsibility to the other he regularly employs religious references, though rarely with extended explanations. This article considers a variety of interpretations of these religious references. Given the importance of Judaism for Levinas, we first examine whether Levinas should be understood as a philosopher or (...) Jewish thinker, presenting arguments on both sides of this debate. We then investigate the relationship between ethics and religion in Levinas’s work, including consideration of the Akedah and the problem of evil. We conclude with explorations of the relationship between reason and revelation and the question of how we ought to think about God. These reflections elucidate the contribution Levinas makes to the philosophy of religion. (shrink)