Levinas Law Politics

Emmanuel Levinas' re-formulation of subjectivity, responsibility and the good has radically influenced post-structuralist thought. Political and legal theory, however, have only marginally profited from his moral philosophy. Levinas' theme of one's infinite responsibility for the other has often been romanticized by some advocates of multiculturalism and natural justice. In this volume, political theorists, philosophers and legal scholars critically engage with this idealization of Levinas’ ethics. The authors show that his crucial formulation of the idea of 'the other in me' does not offer a quick cure for today's nationalist, racist and religious divides. Nor does his notion of anarchic responsibility provide immediate relief for the agony of dealing with matters of life and death. The rebelliousness of Levinas' thought is rediscovered here and used to challenge preconceptions of social, legal and individual responsibility.

In this book, Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani provides the first examination of the applicability of Emmanuel Levinas' work to social and political movements.

Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas's thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas's ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings—including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state—which are controversial reflections of Levinas's political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas's political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds.

In this volume, political theorists, philosophers and legal scholars critically engage with this idealization of Emmanuel Levinas ethics. The rebelliousness of Levinas thought is rediscovered here and used to challenge preconceptions of social, legal and individual responsibility.

This collection brings together major writers and major works on what Emmanuel Levinas means to law, and injects Levinas' provocative ethics right into the heart of living law, radically changing our understanding of both.

The aim of this book is to reflect on the complex practice of responsibility within the context of a globalised world and contemporary means of action. Levinas' exploration of the ethical serves as point of entry and is shown to be seeking inter-cultural political relevance through engagement with the issues of postcoloniality and humanism. Yet, Levinas fails to realise the ethical implications of the inevitable instrumental mediation between ethical meaning and political practice. With recourse to Weber, Apel and Ricoeur, Ernst Wolff proposes a theory of strategic co-responsibility for the uncertain global context of practice.

Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ethics has frequently attracted attention amongst legal scholars, but he remains a divisive and often enigmatic contributor to this field. He has been read within contexts as varied as human rights, private law, refugee law, and on the nature of judicial reasoning. This book explores what unites such apparently diverse applications of his ideas, and in doing so considers the challenge of law's ethical relationship with the other. In addition to asking how Levinas's ethics can inform legal problems, the book also examines how the modern legal edifice has a deceptive tendency to close itself off from the ethical experience. In particular, literatures on biopolitics suggest that law is increasingly complicit in reductive determinations of how we understand ourselves and others. Levinas's most penetrating insight might not, therefore, lie in the law's instrumentalisation of his ethics, but instead in the way his ethics trace a human encounter that escapes law.

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and two extremely provocative thinkers whose reputations have grown considerably, are rarely studied together. This is due to the disparate interests of many of their intellectual heirs. Strauss has influenced political theorists and policy makers on the right while Levinas has been championed in the humanities by different cadres associated with postmodernist thought. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, first published in 2006, Leora Batnitzky brings together these two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that they often had the same philosophical sources and their projects had many formal parallels. While such a comparison is valuable in itself for better understanding each figure, it also raises profound questions in the debate on the definitions of 'religion', suggesting ways that religion makes claims on both philosophy and politics.