Establishes the importance of Husserl's phenomenology for Levinas's ethics.

INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM OF THE BEING OF THE EGO AND THE FUNDAMENTAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF ONTOLOGY "Mit dem cogito sum beansprucht Descartes, der Philosophic ...

INTRODUCTION Ever since the beginning of the modern phenomenological movement disciplined attention has been paid to various patterns of human experience as ...

Introduction : but is it ethics? -- Alterity : the problem of transcendence -- Singularity : the unrepresentable face -- Responsibility : the infinity of the demand -- Ethics : normativity and norms -- Scarce resources? : Levinas, animals, and the environment -- Failures of recognition and the recognition of failure : Levinas and identity politics.

The theological turn in French phenomenology has been of great interest to scholars working in contemporary continental thought, but according to J. Aaron Simmons, not enough has been done to bring these debates into conversation with more mainstream philosophy. Building on the work of Kierkegaard, Levinas, Marion, and Derrida, among others, Simmons suggests how continental philosophy of religion can intersect with political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and theories of knowledge. By productively engaging philosophical "God-talk," Simmons proposes a robust model of postmodern (...) religious belief and ethical existence. (shrink)

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit, Testing the Limit claims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that "the self" is "given"? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgress—or hover around and therefore within—the threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and the (...) first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology (chiefly the legacy of Merleau-Ponty), in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain "family resemblance," the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form. (shrink)

A part of the “return to religion” now evident in European philosophy, this book represents the culmination of the career of a leading phenomenological thinker whose earlier works trace a trajectory from Marx through a genealogy of psychoanalysis that interprets Descartes’s “I think, I am” as “I feel myself thinking, I am.” In this book, Henry does not ask whether Christianity is “true” or “false.” Rather, what is in question here is what Christianity considers as truth, what kind of truth (...) it offers to people, what it endeavors to communicate to them, not as a theoretical and indifferent truth, but as the essential truth that by some mysterious affinity is suitable for them, to the point that it alone is capable of ensuring them salvation. In the process, Henry inevitably argues against the concept of truth that dominates modern thought and determines, in its multiple implications, the world in which we live. Henry argues that Christ undoes “the truth of the world,” that He is an access to the infinity of self-love, to a radical subjectivity that admits no outside, to the immanence of affective life found beyond the despair fatally attached to all objectifying thought. The Kingdom of God accomplishes itself in the here and now through the love of Christ in what Henry calls “the auto-affection of Life.” In this condition, he argues, all problems of lack, ambivalence, and false projection are resolved. (shrink)

As Emmanuel Levinas states in the preface to Existence and Existents, "this study is a preparatory one. It examines . . . the problem of the Good, time, and the relationship with the other [person] as a movement toward the Good." First published in 1947, and written mostly during Levinas's imprisonment during World War II, this work provides the first sketch of his mature thought later developed fully in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This new (...) edition marks the first time this important work has been made available in an inexpensive paperback edition. Levinas's project in Existence and Existents is to move from anonymous existence to the emergence of subjectivity; to subjectivity's practice, theory and morality; to its encounter with the alterity of the other person. He is concerned here primarily with the time of the solitary subject; time is the inner structure of subjectivity, of the movement of existing. "Levinas's work," says Alphonso Lingis, "contains not only wholly new analyses of the forms of time of the present, the past, the future but also a new conception of the work of time." Beginning with Existence and Existents, then, it is possible to begin tracing the progressive "alterization" of time as it unfolds across the development of Levinas's entire philosophy. As a "preparatory" study, Existence and Existents introduces the major themes and concerns that occupied Levinas throughout his career. This is essential reading for understanding both Levinas's own philosophy and the developments in philosophical thought in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Steven Crowell has been for many years a leading voice in debates on twentieth-century European philosophy. This volume presents thirteen recent essays that together provide a systematic account of the relation between meaningful experience and responsiveness to norms. They argue for a new understanding of the philosophical importance of phenomenology, taking the work of Husserl and Heidegger as exemplary, and introducing a conception of phenomenology broad enough to encompass the practices of both philosophers. Crowell discusses Husserl's analyses of first-person authority, (...) the semantics of conscious experience, the structure of perceptual content, and the embodied subject, and shows how Heidegger's interpretation of the self addresses problems in Husserl's approach to the normative structure of meaning. His volume will be valuable for upper-level students and scholars interested in phenomenological approaches to philosophical questions in both the European and the analytic traditions. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers are increasingly turning to the work of Emmanuel Levinas to bring a consideration of ethics into their own thinking. As an exponent of the phenomenological tradition, Levinas ranks with Heidegger and Sartre; as a disciple of Husserl, he was one of the most independent and original interpreters, testifying to the fruitfulness of Husserl's phenomenology. In collecting almost all of Levinas's articles on Husserlian phenomenology, this volume gathers together a wealth of thoughtful exposition and interpretation by one of the (...) most important European philosophers of the twentieth century. Levinas's thought is relevant to a broad variety of disciplines and concerns. This volume serves as a reliable introduction for the beginning student, as well as satisfying the expert's more demanding and critical desire for insight into the complexities of Levinas's thought. (shrink)

Cet article se propose d'interroger la notion d'ipséité chez Lévinas et M. Henry, dans la mesure où ces pensées ont en commun de rechercher l'ipséité en deçà de l'intentionnalité, dans l'expérience du se sentir, que M. Henry nomme « affectivité ». Il s'agit de montrer dans un premier temps, en nous appuyant principalement sur De l'existence à l'existant, que la pensée de Lévinas, souvent comprise comme une pensée de la transcendance soi-disant opposée à l'immanence henrienne, comporte un moment d'immanence, plus (...) précisément, qu'elle découvre cette transcendance dans l'immanence du se sentir. Mais, tandis que M. Henry oppose l'affectivité à la sensibilité, Lévinas montre que l'auto-affection est en même temps une hétéro-affection. Ainsi, d'accord avec M. Henry pour affirmer qu'être soi c'est se sentir, Lévinas affirme dans le même temps qu'un tel se sentir est impossible! Mais ce qui vient ainsi menacer la certitude de soi-même n'est-il pas aussi un moyen d'échapper à une autre forme de perte de soi, qui viendrait de l'accablement du moi par la pesanteur ou la « matérialité » de l'existence? C'est pour répondre à cette question que la seconde partie de ce travail demande si l'affectivité — envisagée sur le plan de la temporalité, du langage et de la relation à autrui — doit être pensée comme immanence ou comme transcendance. This article sets out to question the notion of selfhood in Lévinas and M. Henry's thoughts, insofar as they both contend that selfhood rests on the experience of self-feeling, what M. Henry calls « affectivity ». First, I try to show that Lévinas's philosophy — especially in De l'existence à l'existant —, although often understood as one of transcendence supposedly opposed to Henry's immanence, in reality finds this transcendence in the immanence of self-feeling. But, while M. Henry opposes affectivity to sensibility, Lévinas shows that auto-affection is at the same time hetero-affection. Thus, Lévinas agrees with M. Henry in asserting that selfhood is self-feeling, but, at the same time, thinks that such self-feeling is impossible! But, isn't what thus comes to menace the certitude of oneself also a means of avoiding another kind of loss of individuality, that comes from being weighed down by the burden or the « materiality » of the existence? It is to answer this question that the second part of this article explores whether affectivity must be thought of as immanence or transcendence. (shrink)

Translator's preface -- Introduction: The question of phenomenology -- Hyletic phenomenology and material phenomenology -- The phenomenological method -- Pathos-with reflections on Husserl's Fifth cartesian meditation -- For a phenomenology of community.

When we compare Henry and Levinas, we stumble upon a difficulty. Henry tries to reduce transcendence to immanence; Levinas, on the contrary, strives to call immance into question and to lend a new dignity to transcendence. Hence, the two thinkers seem to be diametrically opposed to one another. Yet, if one does not limit oneself to such an overall view, one finds some similarities between them. There is an affinity between the two approaches which results from the fact that both (...) thinkers establish a narrow relationship between originally passive affectivity and the selfhood of the self. Henry and Levinas are, despite all their differences, united in their efforts to ground selfhood on passivity and affectivity. Assuredly, it remains a question whether or not an originally passive affectivity is really capable of founding selfhood. Some doubt arises here from the observation that affectivity tends to anonymity. However, the observation that affectivity is marked by a tendency to anonymity has not only a negative and critical significance; it also characterizes affective states and arousals in a positive way, since one can maintain that the self could not be a ?self? unless it were constantly confronted with a tendency to anonymity. (shrink)

Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ...

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and two extremely provocative thinkers whose reputations have grown considerably over the last twenty years, are rarely studied together. This is due to the disparate interests of many of their intellectual heirs. Strauss has influenced political theorists and policy makers on the right while Levinas has been championed in the humanities by different cadres associated with postmodernist thought. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, Leora Batnitzky (...) brings together these two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that they often had the same philosophical sources and their projects had many formal parallels. While such a comparison is valuable in itself for better understanding each figure, it also raises profound questions in the current debate on the definitions of 'religion', suggesting new ways that religion makes claims on both philosophy and politics. (shrink)

Welcome to the family -- The sources of new phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger -- How to be a phenomenological heretic: the origins and development of new phenomenology -- Phenomenology and onto-theology -- Phenomenology and theology reconsidered -- New phenomenology on the existence and nature of God -- The call, prayer, and Christian philosophy -- Proposals for new phenomenology and analytic philosophy of religion -- Normativity: ethics, politics, and society -- Possible futures for new phenomenology.