Ethics without exit: Levinas and Murdoch

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 456-470

  Plant, Bob ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950404142     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2003.0054     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. C. Fred Alford, "Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch: Ethics as Exit?," in PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE 26 (2002): 24-42, p. 24
2. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/ Postmodernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1991), p. 219
3. Arthur Schopenhauer, On Human Nature, sel. and trans. T. B. Saunders (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918), p. 123
4. Hilary Putnam, "Levinas and Judaism," in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 36
5. Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 103; hereafter abbreviated OS
6. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1996), p. 168; hereafter abbreviated TI
7. Levinas, Of God Who Comes To Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (California: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 43; hereafter abbreviated GCM
8. Levinas, Is It Righteous To Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 52; hereafter abbreviated IRB
9. Levinas, Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), p. 77; hereafter abbreviated OTB
10. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 188; hereafter abbreviated GDT
11. See also Levinas, GCM, p. 163
12. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (California: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 26-28, 54-56
13. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 61
14. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 97; hereafter abbreviated EI
15. Levinas claims that the human is an "unreasonable animal" because it "cannot not admire saintliness .... that is, the person who in his being is more attached to the being of the other than to his own" ("The Paradox of Morality: an Interview with Emmanuel Levinas," trans. Andrew Benjamin and T. Wright, in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other [London: Routledge, 1988], p. 172; hereafter abbreviated PM)
16. See Levinas, EI, p. 89
17. Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 91, 103; hereafter BPW
18. Alterity & Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1999), p. 107; hereafter AT
19. See also Derrida, "A Word of Welcome," in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 15-123
20. See Levinas's remarks on democracy in PM, p. 175
21. See Levinas, IRB, pp. 53, 119, 113. Levinas's "philosophy rests upon a prephilosophical experience" insofar as "the things that we have within our horizon always overflow their content" (IRB, p. 159)
22. Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 195; hereafter abbreviated EN
23. Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. xiv; hereafter abbreviated DF
24. Levinas, "Ethics of the Infinite," in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 63-64; hereafter abbreviated EOI
25. Blaise Pascal, The Pensées, trans. J. M. Cohen (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1961), §231
26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," in The Social Contract & Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: J. M. Dent, 1930), p. 207
27. Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 82; hereafter abbreviated LR
28. See also Levinas, OS, p. 48
29. For a more detailed analysis - with specific reference to Derrida's recent work - see my "Doing Justice to the Derrida-Levinas Connection: A Response to Mark Dooley," forthcoming in Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 29 (2003)
30. See René Descartes, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach (Middlesex, U.K.: Nelson and Sons, 1976), p. 73
31. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 92
32. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (2d bk.: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), pp. 171, 201, 206
33. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 153-54
34. Levinas, EOI, p. 63
35. Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1997), p. 81
36. Regarding the ethics of touch see also Silvia Benso, The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), pp. 160, 162f
37. See also Levinas, NTR, p. 48
38. BPW, pp. 112-13
39. OS, pp. 142-43
40. See Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 1, trans. David Magarshack (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1967), p. 339
41. Charles Baudelaire, The Poems in Prose and La Fanfarlo, vol. 2, trans. and ed. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1996), p. 53
42. See also Levinas, GDT, p. 162
43. See also Levinas, TI, p. 84
44. IRB, pp. 52, 55-56, 192, 204, 225
45. As John D. Caputo puts it, Levinas has "installed bad conscience as a kind of structural feature of ethical life" ("The End of Ethics," in The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, ed. H. Lafollette [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], p. 116)
46. GDT, pp. 12, 17
47. Compare with Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1998), pp. 59, 62. Derrida has written much recently on this aspect of Levinas's work