Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas
Title | Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas PDF eBook |
Author | Tina Chanter |
Publisher | Penn State Press |
Total Pages | 292 |
Release | 2010-11 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9780271044156 |
This volume of essays, all but one previously unpublished, investigates the question of Levinas&’s relationship to feminist thought. Levinas, known as the philosopher of the Other, was famously portrayed by Simone de Beauvoir as a patriarchal thinker who denigrated women by viewing them as the paradigmatic Other. Reconsideration of the validity of this interpretation of Levinas and exploration of what more positively can be derived from his thought for feminism are two of this volume&’s primary aims. Levinas breaks with Heidegger&’s phenomenology by understanding the ethical relation to the Other, the face-to-face, as exceeding the language of ontology. The ethical orientation of Levinas&’s philosophy assumes a subject who lives in a world of enjoyment, a world that is made accessible through the dwelling. The feminine presence presides over this dwelling, and the feminine face represents the first welcome. How is this feminine face to be understood? Does it provide a model for the infinite obligation to the Other, or is it a proto-ethical relation? The essays in this volume investigate this dilemma. Contributors are Alison Ainley, Diane Brody, Catherine Chalier, Luce Irigaray, Claire Katz, Kelly Oliver, Diane Perpich, Stella Sandford, Sonya Sikka, and Ewa Ziarek.
Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas
Title | Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas PDF eBook |
Author | Tina Chanter |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 290 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9780271049106 |
Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine
Title | Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine PDF eBook |
Author | Claire Elise Katz |
Publisher | Indiana University Press |
Total Pages | 220 |
Release | 2003-11-14 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0253110777 |
Challenging previous interpretations of Levinas that gloss over his use of the feminine or show how he overlooks questions raised by feminists, Claire Elise Katz explores the powerful and productive links between the feminine and religion in Levinas's work. Rather than viewing the feminine as a metaphor with no significance for women or as a means to reinforce traditional stereotypes, Katz goes beyond questions of sexual difference to reach a more profound understanding of the role of the feminine in Levinas's conception of ethical responsibility. She combines feminist interpretations of Levinas with interpretations that focus on his Jewish writings to reveal that the feminine provides an important bridge between his philosophy and his Judaism. Katz's reading of Levinas's conception of the feminine against the backdrop of discussions of women of the Hebrew bible points to important shifts in contemporary philosophy toward the creation of life and care for the other.
The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas
Title | The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas PDF eBook |
Author | Diane Perpich |
Publisher | Stanford University Press |
Total Pages | 253 |
Release | 2008 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0804759421 |
This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.
The Metaphysics of Love
Title | The Metaphysics of Love PDF eBook |
Author | Stella Sandford |
Publisher | A&C Black |
Total Pages | 180 |
Release | 2001-11-01 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0567225488 |
Emmanuel Levinas is best known for having reintroduced the question of ethics into the Continental philosophical tradition. In The Metaphysics of Love, however, Stella Sandford argues that an over-emphasis on ethics in the reception of Levinas's thought has covered over both the basis and the details of his philosophical project--a metaphysics which affirms the necessity to think of an unqualified transcendence as a first principle. Sandford's book is at the same time a powerful feminist critique of both Levinas's gendered philosophical categories and the attempt to reclaim aspects of this philosophy for feminist theory.
Time, Death, and the Feminine
Title | Time, Death, and the Feminine PDF eBook |
Author | Tina Chanter |
Publisher | Stanford University Press |
Total Pages | 324 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9780804743112 |
Examining Levinass critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinass thought. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heideggers tendency to collapse the ecstases (past, present, and future) of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. The author suggests that though Levinass conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heideggers philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinass philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics.
Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics
Title | Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics PDF eBook |
Author | Joshua James Shaw |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 248 |
Release | 2008 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN |
Emmanuel Levinas has come to be regarded as one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century European philosophy. Initially seen as an obscure popularizer of phenomenology, Levinas is now widely admired for his original philosophic writings on the encounter with "the other," his place in post-Holocaust Jewish philosophy, his influence on Derrida, and his powerful claims about the importance of ethics for philosophy and for human life generally. The past several years have seen an explosion of interest in his thought. Critics have charged, however, that his philosophy is seriously flawed by his failure to convey his understanding of ethical responsibility in a practical ethical theory. Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First defends Levinas against this criticism. In doing so, it develops an interpretation that stresses Levinas' sensitivity to the urgency of acting to help those who are vulnerable. The book departs from trends in Levinas scholarship. Many scholars emphasize Levinas' epistemological claims about the incomprehensibility and inexpressibility of the relation to the other as the foundational theses of his philosophy. By contrast, Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics shows how he reaches them based on a subtle analysis of the practical demands involved in recognizing responsibility for others. The book argues that Levinas is best read as pragmatic thinker, one who, above all, is concerned to stress the importance of practical effectiveness in serving the other. Finally, the book shows how his understanding of responsibility can be expressed in practical ethical theories given this pragmatic interpretation. This book is an important work for Levinas scholars, particularly those interested in his relevance for contemporary ethical debates and for social and political philosophy. The book develops an interpretation that avoids jargon, and new readers as well as readers interested in placing Levinas in dialogue with Anglo-American philosophy will find it a useful resource. The book's efforts to situate Levinas in relation to issues in analytic ethics, such as Rawls' theory of justice and debates over moral realism, will be of particular interest to the latter.