Contemporary bioethics pays considerable attention to the ethical aspects of dementia care. However, ethical issues of sexuality especially as experienced by institutionalized persons with dementia are often overlooked. The relevant existing ethics literature generally applies an implicit philosophical anthropology that favors the principle of respect for autonomy and the concomitant notion of informed consent. In this article we will illustrate how this way of handling the issue fails in its duty to people with dementia. Our thesis is that a more (...) inclusive philosophical anthropology is needed that also heeds the fate of this growing population. Drawing on the tradition of phenomenology, we will chalk out an anthropological framework that rests on four fundamental characteristics of human existence: the decentered self, human embodiment, being-in-the-world and being-with-others. Our aim in this article is thus to tentatively put forward a broader perspective for looking at aged sexuality in institutionalized people with dementia. Hopefully the developed framework will mark the beginning of a new and refreshed ethical reflection on the topic at hand. (shrink)

I present `disruption' as what is most fundamental to Levinas' account of transcendence. I argue that one should read his treatment of the Other as a modulation of transcendence, and prioritize the structures of positionality and solitude as the conditions that make transcendence possible. Hence, Being is transcended insofar as these structures have `always already' articulated the rupturing of the subject, which, for Levinas, constitutes her transcending. Included in my argument is a critique of reading Levinas' project as undermining the (...) fundamentally solitary nature of human existence because of his focus on alterity. Such a reading reduces Levinas' account of alterity, instead of maintaining its signification as that which is `never there.' It is the solitary existent who is vulnerable before an `already gone by' alterity, such that her subjectivity is radically disrupted. For Levinas, an encounter with alterity is the agony of finding no one, or having nowhere, from which I can be granted wholeness or justification. It follows that transcendence is fundamentally concretized in a positioned solitude, and not in some inter-subjective space. (shrink)

_Explores the ethical and political implications of Levinas’s and Sartre’s accounts of human existence._.

Critics of Levinas reject the notion that the abstract face of the other can ground ethics and generate specific responsibilities. To the contrary, I argue that the face does ground a practical and pragmatic ethics. Drawing on Levinas' phenomenological analyses of the enjoying subject, I show that the face communicates an imperative to the subject that obligates her or him to repair the concrete context of action in which the subject encounters the other. My elucidation takes very seriously the notion (...) that the face speaks and the face is a body. When coupled with a pragmatic account of communication, Levinas gives us a robust elucidation of the phenomenological and pragmatic dimensions of ethical responsibility. Key Words: embodiment • ethics • face • Emmanuel Levinas • phenomenology • pragmatics • responsibility. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Levinas can be read as a critic, not just of Heideggerian being, but also of being-with. After pointing out that the publication of the Black Notebooks only makes this criticism more interesting to revisit, I first of all discuss passages from both earlier and later writings in which Levinas explicitly takes issue with Heidegger’s claim that there is no self outside of a specific socio-historical community. I then explain how these criticisms are reflected in (...) Levinas’s own account, arguing that Levinasian subjectivity and alterity are precisely defined by their not belonging to a larger unity; to the extent that they partake in a multi-personal collectivity, this does not take the form of a traditional community. In the final section, I look into a different and seemingly opposing argument Levinas makes against Heidegger: on the basis of the latter’s reflections on death, he argues that Dasein is anti-social rather than overly immersed in the socio-historical. Arguing that this rests on a misreading of Being and Time, I use this opportunity to raise questions about Levinas’s interpretation of Heidegger and his “otherwise than being-with” more generally, for Levinas’s account runs into several problems as well. Yet as I will conclude, this in fact offers a valuable insight, not just for the present-day reception of Heidegger, but also for thinking community today. It indicates that a radical break with human situatedness does not automatically fare better than a firmly enrooted account of existence. (shrink)

In this reading a notion of the human is developed through an engagement with the work of French philosopher Emanuel Levinas. The argument is that, with the help of Levinas, it is possible for the idea of the human to be understood anew, for the notion to be ‘resaid’. This resaying of the human is performed in a critical appropriation of the philosophical tradition: Levinas’s work is shown not to be a new variation of the complacent ideology of humanism; the (...) idea of the human is instead interpreted to be the bearer of the very movement of critique. This movement is articulated in terms of a transcendence of a discursive ‘economy of violence’. Critique does not establish a permanent position outside of violence, but is a movement that must constantly be renewed. Here Levinas is offered as a modern thinker of particular relevance for contemporary discussions surrounding the nature both of the political and of Human Rights. In addition one finds a systematic analysis of the major works of Levinas, unraveling how a notion of the human develops from within his philosophy. Levinas’s thought is placed alongside philosophical figures of his time, such as Heidegger, Sartre, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault and Derrida, as well as more recent political thinkers, for example, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière. (shrink)