The Provocation Of Levinas

This book brings together the most interesting and far-reaching responses to the work of Levinas in three key areas: contemporary feminism, psychotherapy and Levinas's relation to other philosophers.

Animal Philosophy is the first text to look at the place and treatment of animals in Continental thought. A collection of essential primary and secondary readings on the animal question, it brings together contributions from the following key Continental thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Ferry, Cixous, and Irigaray. Each reading is followed by commentary and analysis from a leading contemporary thinker. The coverage of the subject is exceptionally broad, ranging across perspectives that include existentialism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, phenomenology and feminism. This anthology is an invaluable one-stop resource for anyone researching, teaching or studying animal ethics and animal rights in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, environmental studies and gender and women's studies.

A compelling account of politics and social philosophy in Levinas's Talmudic commentaries Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a French philosopher known for his radical ethics and for his contribution to Jewish thought in his commentaries on Talmudic sources. In Levinas's Politics, Annabel Herzog confronts a major difficulty in Levinas's philosophy: the relationship between ethics and politics. Levinas's ethics describes the encounter with the other, that is, with any other human being. For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter is a relationship in which the ego is commanded by a transcendent and unquestionable order to take responsibility for the other person. Politics, on the other hand, presupposes at least three people: the ego, the other, and any third party. Among three people, nothing can be transcendent; on the contrary, everything must be negotiated. Against the conventional view of Levinas's conception of the political as the interruption and collapse of the ethical, Herzog argues that in the Talmudic readings, Levinas constructed politics positively. She shows that Levinas's Talmudic readings embody a pragmatism that complements, revises, and challenges the extreme ethical analyses he offers in his phenomenological works—Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being, and Of God Who Comes to Mind. Her analysis illuminates Levinas's explanations of the relationship between ethics and politics: ethics is the foundation of justice; justice contains a necessary violence that must be moderated by mercy; and justice, general laws, and national aspirations must be linked in an attempt to "improve universality itself."

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers.

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.

Reading a text is an ethical activity for Emmanuel Levinas. His moral philosophy considers written texts to be natural places to discover relations of responsibility in Western philosophical systems which are marked by extreme violence and totalizing hatred. While ethics is understood to mean a relationship with the other and reading is the appropriation of the other to the self, readings according to Levinas naturally entail relationships with the other. Levinas's own writings are often frought with the struggle between his own maleness, the concerns of feminism, and the Judaism that marks his contributions to the debates of the Talmud. This book uses male feminism as its perspective in presenting the applications of Levinas's ethical vision to texts whose readings have presented moral dilemmas for women readers. Levinas's philosophical theories can provide keys to unlock the difficulties of these texts whose readings will provide models of reading as ethical acts beginning with the ethical contract in Song of Songs where the assumption of a woman writer begins the elaboration of issues that sets a male reader as her other. From the reader's vantage point of seeing the self as other, other issues of male feminism become increasingly poignant, ranging from the solicitude of listening to Céline (Chapter 2), the responsibility for noise in Nizan (Chapter 3), the asymmetrical pattern of face-to-face relationships in Maupassant (Chapter 4), the sovereignty of laughter in Bataille and Zola (Chapter 5), the call of the other in Italo Svevo (Chapter 6), the Woman as Other in Breton (Chapter 7), the ethical self in Drieu la Rochelle (Chapter 8), the response to Hannah Arendt (Chapter 9), and the vulnerability of Bernard-Henri Lévy (Chapter 10). The male feminist reader is thus the incarnation of the struggle at the core of the issues outlined by Levinas for the act of reading as an ethical endeavor.

Introduction to Phenomenology is an outstanding and comprehensive guide to phenomenology. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology's nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Written in a clear and engaging style, Introduction to Phenomenology charts the course of the phenomenological movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomonology's most famous thinkers, and introduces and assesses the distinctive use of phenomonology by some of its lesser known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout the book, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored. This is an indispensible introduction for all unfamiliar with this much talked about but little understood school of thought. Technical terms are explained throughout and jargon is avoided. Introduction to Phenomenology will be of interest to all students seeking a reliable introduction to a key movement in European thought.