Between Levinas And Lacan

Levinas and Lacan traces the similar concepts and logics of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, to explicitly render the rigorous questioning of the philosophic tradition undertaken by these thinkers, and to articulate the theoretical stakes and practical consequences of such a conjunction for ethics. In this book, contemporary philosophers examine this missed encounter between Levinas and Lacan by tracing their preoccupation with issues that emerge in late modernity: language, subjectivity, alterity, and ethics.

Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work, Mari Ruti charts the ethical terrain between them. At first glance, Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently: while Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of our failure to adequately escape the forms this demand frequently takes. Although this book outlines the major differences between Levinas and Judith Butler on the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou on the other, Ruti proposes that underneath these differences one can discern a shared concern with the thorny relationship between the singularity of experience and the universality of ethics. Between Levinas and Lacan is an important new book for anyone interested in contemporary theory, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.

Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work, Mari Ruti charts the ethical terrain between them. At first glance, Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently: while Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of our failure to adequately escape the forms this demand frequently takes. Although this book outlines the major differences between Levinas and Judith Butler on the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou on the other, Ruti proposes that underneath these differences one can discern a shared concern with the thorny relationship between the singularity of experience and the universality of ethics. Between Levinas and Lacan is an important new book for anyone interested in contemporary theory, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.

Draws attention to the enigmatic missed encounter between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan, and articulates the theoretical stakes and practical consequences of such a disjunctive encounter for ethics.

The Intervention of the Other deftly brings the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan into fruitful dialogue through a comparative analysis of these two seemingly disparate thinkers. Emmanuel Levinas, Lithuanian-born French phenomenologist of the nonphenomenon, and Jacques Lacan, controversial French psychoanalyst and (post)structuralist theorist of the Freudian Unconscious, lived and wrote in the same city, at the same time, among the same colleagues, often using the same language and the same sources, sometimes writing to the same audiencesóand yet they never wrote to or about one another. Following Sartre, Levinas thought that Freud had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of consciousness when he posited the Unconscious as a second, but hidden, consciousness. Despite this suspicion of psychoanalysis, however, Levinasí own work celebrated a certain something that could not be contained by thought. For his part, Lacan was suspicious of philosophical ethics. He subscribed to a Freudian critique of ethics as pathogenic. Nevertheless, he saw his own work as fundamentally about a kind of ethics, specifically an ethics concerned with how people live their lives in an already normative society. While the two never engaged with each otherís thought directly, Levinas and Lacan were interested in many of the same questions: What is the nature of the self? What is it to be a subject? Can the ethical be grounded in a post-foundationalist world? Through close textual analysis, David Ross Fryer shows how Levinas and Lacan offer two ways of positing the ethical subject in the post-humanist landscape of contemporary thought.

This book explores how the notion of human identity informs the ethical goal of justice in human rights. Within the modern discourse of human rights, the issue of identity has been largely neglected. However, within this discourse lies a conceptualisation of identity that was derived from a particular liberal philosophy about the ‘true nature’ of the isolated, self-determining and rational individual. Rights are thus conceived as something that are owned by each independent self, and that guarantee the exercise of its autonomy. Critically engaging this subject of rights, this book considers how recent shifts in the concept of identity and, more specifically, the critical humanist notion of ‘the other’, provides a basis for re-imagining the foundation of contemporary human rights. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, an inter-subjectivity between self and other ‘always already’ marks human identity with an ethical openness. And, this book argues, it is in the shift away from the human self as a ‘sovereign individual’ that human rights have come to reflect a self-identity that is grounded in the potential of an irreducible concern for the other.

Within the modern discourse of human rights, the issue of identity has been largely neglected. This book explores how the notion of human identity informs the ethical goal of justice in human rights. Rights are conceived as something that are owned by each independent self, and that guarantee the exercise of its autonomy. Critically engaging this subject of rights, The Self, Ethics & Human Rights considers how recent shifts in the concept of identity and, more specifically, the critical humanist notion of 'the other', provides a basis for re-imagining the foundation of contemporary human rights.