Levinas Adorno And The Ethics Of The Material Other

This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the "non-identity thinking" of Adorno and the "ethics of the Other" of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and "inhuman" material others such as environments and animals; the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life.

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the key philosophers in the post-Heideggerian field and an increasingly central presence in contemporary debates about identity and responsibility. His work spans and encapsulates the major philosophical and ethical concerns of the twentieth century, combining the insights of a basic phenomenological training with the demands of a Jewish culture and its basis in the endless exegesis of Talmudic reading. His concerns and subjects are wide: they include the Other, the body, infinity, women, Jewish-Christian relations, Zionism and the impulses and limits of philosophical language itself. This collection explicates Levinas's major contribution to these debates, namely the idea of the primacy of ethics over ontology or epistemology. It investigates how, in the wake of a post-structuralist orthodoxy, scholars and practitioners in such fields as literary theory, cultural studies, feminism and psychoanalysis are turning to Levinas's work to articulate a rediscovered concern with the ethical dimension of their discipline. Stressing the largely assumed but unexplored Jewish dimension of Levinas's work, this book is an important contribution to the field of Jewish studies and philosophy.

Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy’s most pressing issues. Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple—and accurate—oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.

What does it mean to wonder in awe or terror about the world? How do you philosophically understand Judaism? In How to Measure a World?: A Philosophy of Judaism, Martin Shuster provides answers to these questions and more. Emmanuel Levinas suggested that Judaism is best understood as an anachronism. Shuster attempts to make sense of this claim by alternatively considering questions of the inscrutability of ultimate reality, of the pain and commonness of human suffering, and of the ways in which Judaism is entangled with the world. Drawing on phenomenology and Jewish thought, Shuster offers novel readings of some of the classic figures of Jewish philosophy while inserting other voices into the tradition, from Moses Maimonides to Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin to Stanley Cavell. How to Measure a World? examines elements of the Jewish philosophical record to get at the full intellectual scope and range of Levinas's proposal. Shuster's view of anachronism thereby provokes an assessment of the world and our place in it. A particular understanding of Jewish philosophy emerges, not only through the traditions it encompasses, but also through an understanding of the relationship between humans and their world. In the end, Levinas's suggestion is examined theoretically as much as practically, revealing what's at stake for Judaism as much as for the world.

Originally published in in 2004. What, at this historical moment "after Auschwitz," still remains of the questions traditionally asked by theology? What now is theology's minimal degree? This magisterial study, the first extended comparison of the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, explores remnants and echoes of religious forms in these thinkers' critiques of secular reason, finding in the work of both a "theology in pianissimo" constituted by the trace of a transcendent other. The author analyzes, systematizes, and formalizes this idea of an other of reason. In addition, he frames these thinkers' innovative projects within the arguments of such intellectual heirs as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, defending their work against later accusations of "performative contradiction" (by Habermas) or "empiricism" (by Derrida) and in the process casting important new light on those later writers as well. Attentive to rhetorical and rational features of Adorno's and Levinas's texts, his investigations of the concepts of history, subjectivity, and language in their writings provide a radical interpretation of their paradoxical modes of thought and reveal remarkable and hitherto unsuspected parallels between their philosophical methods, parallels that amount to a plausible way of overcoming certain impasses in contemporary philosophical thinking. In Adorno, this takes the form of a dialectical critique of dialectics; in Levinas, that of a phenomenological critique of phenomenology, each of which sheds new light on ancient and modern questions of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. For the English-language publication, the author has extensively revised and updated the prize-winning German version.

Levinas's big idea is that our lived sense of moral obligation occurs in an immediate experience of the otherness of the Other, and that moral meaning is grounded in alterity rather than identity. Yet he also held what seemed an inconsiderate, or "eurocentric," view of other cultural traditions. In Saying Peace, Jack Marsh explores this problem, testing the coherence and adequacy of Levinas's central philosophical claims. Using a twofold method of reconstruction and critique, Marsh conducts a holistic immanent evaluation of Levinas's major works, showing how the problem of eurocentrism, and abiding ambiguities in Levinas's political and religious thought, can be traced back to specific problems in his general philosophical methodology. Marsh offers an original analysis of Levinas's method that verifies and extends existing critical work by Jacques Derrida, Robert Bernasconi, Judith Butler, and others. This is the first book to foreground the normative question of chauvinism in Levinas's work, and the first to perform a holistic critical diagnosis of his general philosophical method.

This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.

This collection is intercultural philosophy at its best. It contextualizes the global significance of the leading figures of Western phenomenology, including Husserl, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber and Levinas, enters them into intercultural dialogue with the Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi and in doing so, breaks new ground. By presenting the first sustained analysis of the Daoist worldview by way of phenomenological experience, this book not only furthers our understanding of Daoism and phenomenology, but delves deeper into the roots of human thinking, aesthetic expression, and its impact on the modern social world. The international team of philosophers approach the phenomenological tradition in the broadest sense possible, looking beyond the phenomenological language of Husserl. With chapters on art, ethics, death and the metaphor of dream and hermeneutics, this collection encourages scholars and students in both Asian and Western traditions to rethink their philosophical bearings and engage in meaningful intercultural dialogue.