Searching for the Other in Vision. First, to complications of sight.

Summary of Chloe Taylor’s essay “Hard, Dry Eyes That Weep: Vision and Ethics in Levinas and Derrida.” 2006

This article may interest you, if you are interested in the following: Ethics in Levinasian discourse, the Other: in vision and language, anti-platonic “non-light”, masculine intrusive vision vs. compassionate vision, the Other for the blindman, and Greek animals that cannot close their eyes.

Hägglund’s “The Necessity of Discrimination”

An example of Derridian dogmatism par excellence (which I think would be enough to make Derrida cringe, with Hägglund’s adherence to what he paradoxically describes as ‘deconstructive logic’), “The Necessity of Discrimination” aims to break apart Derrida and Levinas entirely by pointing to the violence Derrida understands as constitutive of every relation. By reading an ethical motivation into his method of deconstruction – understanding it as an aspiration to a non-violent relation, or an effort to preserve or restore a respect for alterity – one misses Derrida’s rethinking of time as fundamentally disjointed. In his writings on the trace, Derrida elaborates: every event is split between being no longer and being not yet.

“The Opposite of Totality:Levinas and the Frankfurt School” C.Fred Alford

In this essay, Alford closely examines the relationship between Emmanuel Levinas and the Frankfurt, but more specifically, between Levinas and Theodor Adorno. One may wonder how such a relationship could possibly exist, being that these two writes in particular have practically nothing in common when examined at face value–which an issue that Alford addresses in his own analysis and critique. Throughout Alford’s examination of both Levinas and Adorno, the similarities between these two thinkers is exposed in regards to the major concepts that they both examine in their respective works, as well as the arguments that both construct in order to support those very concepts. To the same extent, that is also where the differences between Adorno and Levinas emerge as well.

“The Possibility of the Poetic Said” in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Levinas) by Gabriel Riera

Gabriel Riera’s essay traces the subject of art and the notion of the “poetic said” and the “poetic saying” within Levinas’s thought.

Riera begins by affirming the importance of language to Levinas’s philosophy. He introduces the two central concepts of Otherwise than Being, the said and the saying, and affirms the possibility of an ethical relationship with the Other that is established through them.

David Wood, “Some Questions for My Levinasian Friends”

The key issue David Wood explores in “Some Questions for My Levinasian Friends” is a (hidden) ontological commitment in Levinas’s work. Specifically, Wood discusses at length Levinas’s reading of Heidegger. There are also interesting threads of Wood’s essay that might appeal to a wide range of our interests as a class: the relationship between human and non-human others, the il y a, Levinas and Descartes, Levinas’s account of the state of nature, etc. Wood’s essay is on the shorter side so I’m going to leave out a lot of interesting details in order to avoid having a summary longer than the essay itself.

Levinas and Escape

To tease out the Levinas that we have read I have turned to another source, “On Escape” a short essay that Levinas wrote in the thirties in which he writes lucidly about a view that he holds to be primordial to being, that of the need to escape being. He draws on a view common to need, that is a privation of our fall from the eternal and is as such rooted in lack (he says much more about bourgeois self unity and the i in a voice that is more explicitly political and seemingly angry than I have read elsewhere.) This of course is a common theory which many theorists work to debunk but few I think do so with the vigor and a trembling of voice in view of being. I think this voice is the translation of the desperation with which he thinks this point must be brought about, a desperation that he argues is primordial to being trapped in an ontology of being.

heidegger and es gibt, levinas and the semiotic

Hey everyone;

Just a couple questions I had regarding the first few pages of Otherwise than Being. My questions concern Heidegger (and, of course, Levinas), Being (Es Gibt vs. the “there is”), language (the question of/importance of), and semiotics (specifically, signification).

Ethics and political identities

A number of people asked about this today, and we’ll have to revisit it (again and again…it’s that important): what is the relation between a Levinasian ethics and politics? To be sure, Levinas takes our conventional understandings out from under us, moving what seems to be a liberation in political action into the sphere of totalitarianism. Seriously. Totalitarianism, or at least the formal possibility of it.

Totality, history, totalitarianism

There is this old question, always worth asking: how is it that Europe – literate, cultured, enlightened, etc. – could be the site of something like the Shoah? I think Levinas has an answer in these early chapters of Totality and Infinity.

Getting started…

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