This article offers a Levinasian reading of the case of Airedale N.H.S. Trust v Bland. My contention is that the judicial reasoning that gave rise to the decision that Anthony Bland should die was driven by an ontological imperative I submit from a Levinasian perspective the decision was ethically indefensible because it failed to recognise Anthony Bland as the other.

Today there is no sophisticated theory, which continues to rely on subjectivist premises. It is important, however, that anti-humanism theory's disinterestedness in the subject of voluntarism does not lead to an indifference towards being's constitutive non-essence and passivity in the manner of the worst kind of humanism. Emmanuel Levinas' places ‘absurd’ suffering in the place of essence as the knot of subjectivity; his view of the quiddity of suffering as mode of being passively rather than as psychological content and of (...) the modality of disinterested compassion are used in order to formulate the question `who comes after the subject' in ways which allow us to continue thinking of what it means to be affected in an individuated manner without returning us to the subject of self-presence and autonomy. (shrink)