Levinas and the Time of Sensibility: A Material Transcendence? (original) (raw)
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The Body and Transcendence in Emmanuel Levinas' Phenomenological Ethics
This paper is a presentation of Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of corporeality that shows struggling dialectic from a phenomenology of a sensiblesubjecttowardsanethicsoftranscendence. Withtheauthor’s attempt to show that the Good is given and received through sensibility held by the body dwelling in the world, she proposes that the seeming conflict between the seeming corporeal pull to dwelling as against the Desire to take an ethical flight can be settled when one courageously confronts the following truths about humanity: that human beings are, 1) more than their thoughts, as 2) they are made of flesh and blood and that 3) they are in and thus influenced by the world. Through the work of corporeality, the subject is weakened by pain despite virility, suffers despite being at home and longs for a sublime unknown in the face of plenitude. By the stern conviction that existence can also be obscure and indefinite for consciousness to old, Levinas is able to explain how an egoistic subject is humbled and prepared to welcome the Other. Key words: Levinas, coroporeality, alterity, phenomenological ethics
The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution
*Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities*, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2011
This is a study of the way in which Levinas approaches the experience of human expression (the "face" or bodies that "face" us) from two perspectives: firstly, as a pre-thematic or pre-cognitive "experience," which requires that he revisit Husserl's pre-objective intentionality (first explored in 1900) and explore the relationship between the upsurge of sensation ("Urhyle") and its "intentionalization" as time consciousness. Thereafter, Levinas must contend with the implications of his own writing (i.e., his explicit thematizing *and* rhetoric), which includes his claims for the face. In brief, this implies that Levinas must grapple with criticism to the effect that he is providing a (foundationless) hermeneutics of face-to-face encounters (and later, of the "other-in-the-same," which is preëminently an affective "memory" that returns and repeats, without recollected representations). Levinas himself acknowledges that his writing is a "dramatique des phénomènes" or dramatisation of phenomena. How then to avoid the charge of arbitrary description? How to step outside the primordiality of "the phrase" or of conceptualization that necessarily precedes any "pure" phenomenology? This is the stake of Levinas's second great work (1974). In this essay, I explore the role that "substitution" plays in weaving together conceptuality and phenomenality; I contrast this with other forms of "dramatisation," from narrative witnessing (C. Delbo, I. Kertesz), to sculptural deconstruction (Giacometti). My essay is indebted, among others, to the recent book of D. Franck, *L'un pour l'autre*, as well as to the more experimental research of Husserl in the 1920s and early '30s.
“The Primacy of Disruption in Levinas’ Account of Transcendence”,
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, by 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.
“The ‘Face’ of the il y a: Levinas and Blanchot on Impersonal Existence”
Levinas’ formulation of the il y a is pivotal in his conception of transcendence. So, as scholars of his work, we must grapple with the ambiguous and formidable ‘present absence’ of what he refers to as a field of impersonal existence. This is necessary not only to understand how he situates himself with regard to Western philosophy’s obsessions with transcendence, but to also appreciate the singularity of his conception of the Face, alterity and, ultimately, the ethical. Elsewhere, I have argued for a reading of Levinas’ worLek, which prioritizes the significance of the il y a over the personal Other. Here, I buttress this reading by using the well-documented intersections between Levinas’ work and that of Maurice Blanchot. Said otherwise, I argue that Levinas’ relationship with Blanchot (a relationship that is very much across the notion of the il y a) calls scholars of his work to place his conception of impersonal existence to the forefront. To do so is to take seriously the complex relationship between Levinas’ explicitly ethical account of the face, and his phenomenological account of impersonal existence. To approach Levinas in this way (by way of his relationship with Blanchot) is to not only recognize that the ethical import of the face lies in its being without determination or nomenclature, but it is to also fully acknowledge the underlying horror of a Levinasian rendition of the ethical encounter.
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 selfpossession 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' (me voici). In suggesting the implication of this claim with Levinas we find how the ethical subjectivity is beyond dualistic assertions and racist conceptions.
The Beyond and Its Shadow: Emmanuel Levinas On Visual Art as Transdescendence
2019
Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy has consistently put forward that transcendence should not just stop in transcending oneself towards a higher and abstract state of being. Rather, it should ultimately be sought after in one’s encounter with the individual beings that present themselves to us, or in his terms, the Other. For Levinas, one’s relation to the Other is the epitome of radical alterity as he puts an emphasis in such infinity that is in every person which is simultaneously being represented and masked by the Face. This insurmountable reality is what served as his grounds for a substantial transcendental ethics in which he underlines a desire for the ethical relationship with the Other or in BeingfortheOther. Upon reading Levinas’ philosophy, it is noticeable that he has constantly made use of aesthetic references, which signify how he has had various literary and aesthetic influences. However, throughout his works, the said references to art and the aesthetic activity apparently...