Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch: Ethics as exit?

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 24-42

  Alford, C Fred ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33947371233     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2002.0001     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 140
2. Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 181, 223
3. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillippe Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 85; hereafter abbreviated as EI
4. This is my version of a story told by Levinas in "Enigma and Phenomenon," in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 65-78. I have added some details and made it more concrete
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men" (Second Discourse), in The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger Masters and Judith Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press. 1964), pp. 77-228
6. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 134; hereafter abbreviated as T&I
7. The term "infinity" means several things in Levinas, and he rarely distinguishes the different senses in which he uses the term. He becomes much clearer when we do. (A) Infinity means timelessness in the sense of the medieval nunc stans, eternity as a place outside of time. The shattering experience of the other about which Levinas writes is located (if that is the right word) under this sense of infinity. (B) Infinity means absolute difference, as in an infinity of difference between you and me. This is the practical version of infinity, so to speak, how it manifests itself in our everyday world. No matter how similar I am to another person in sociological terms, we are completely and utterly different by virtue of being separate people, so different we cannot be compared. See "Transcendence and Height," Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 11-31
8. The difference between us is infinite in the sense that it is not subject to comparison. I am asking the reader to think about whether this is true. (C) Infinity means an intrusion of otherness so shocking and complete it tears me from my ego. "The epiphany of the other, which is the concrete form of the infinite," is how Peperzak puts it, in To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1983), p. 182. Here infinity refers not just to otherness, but a shattering experience of non-being, as though someone ripped open the vault of the heavens to reveal nothing. It is in this sense of the term that Levinas is writing here. (D) Sometimes infinity means God
9. Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 69
10. Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 79-153
11. Iris Marion Young, "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference," in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 300-323
12. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 38
13. Burness Moore and Bernard Fine, eds., Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (New Haven: Yale University Press and the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1990), p. 52
14. Levinas, De l'évasion (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982)
15. John-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1949), p. 179
16. Levinas, "There is: Existence Without Existents," in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), pp. 29-36, 33
17. Levinas, "There is," p. 33
18. Levinas, "Transcendence and Height," p. 27
19. Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987)
20. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin, 1992)
21. Murdoch, "The Sublime and the Good," in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 205-20, 215; hereafter abbreviated as "Sublime."
22. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 30; hereafter abbreviated as Sovereignty
23. Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 41
24. Levinas, "Heidegger, Gagarin and Us," in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 231-34
25. Murdoch, "The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited," in Existentialists and Mystics, pp. 261-86, 282
26. Stuart Dalton, "Obligation to the Other in Levinas and the Sublime in Kant," ∠http://uhavax.hartford.edu/dalton/sublimeobligation. html〉
27. Antonaccio, Picturing the Human, pp. 222-23
28. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge, pp. 53, 370
29. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 377
30. Murdoch, The Bell (New York: Penguin, 1958), p. 131