Otherwise than guilt? Challenging strands of Levinas's politics

Parallax

Volumn 8, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 59-70

  Coyle, Charmaine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 61249688634     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13534640210150609     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (12)

1. I have in mind here something like Howard Caygill, 'Levinas's Political Judgement. The Esprit Articles, 1934-1983', Radical Philosophy, no. 104 (2000). Caygill, while by no means writing an apologetics, provides a possible explanation for some articles Levinas published in the journal Esprit.
2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh (PA): Duquesne University Press, 1969), p.277.
3. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p.278-285. Here there is a clear line drawn from ethics, election and fraternity. As the section entitled 'The Infinity of Time' closes with the proclamation of the possibility of 'messianic triumph', whereby fecundity is the necessary condition for 'the particularism of the apology to be converted into efficacious goodness, the question is raised but left unanswered as to whether infinite time is an alteration in the very structure of time itself or if it is a messianic vigilance. It is the interconnectedness of the ideas of paternity and fraternity along with this idea of vigilance and the messianic that suggests that there is another source (other than phenomenolgy) at work in Levinas's philosophical works.
4. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987) p.113-118.
5. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p.107 illustrates the very corporeal nature of this structure: 'Exposed outside by breathing, by divesting its ultimate substance even to the mucous membrane of the lungs, continually splitting up'.
6. The Talmudic reading 'The Temptation of Temptation' asserts that the most guilty are perhaps the intellectuals and theorists: 'They are responsible because they have not been righteous enough to make their justice spread and abolish injustice; it is the fiasco of the best which leaves the coast clear for the worst'. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press, 1990), p.186.
7. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, p.195.
8. Emmanuel Levinas, 'Ethics and Politics', in Sean Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p.292.
9. Levinas, 'Ethics and Polities', p.293.
10. Levinas, 'Zionisms', p.274.
11. Emmanuel Levinas, 'Useless Suffering', trans. R. Cohen, in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), p.159.
12. Levinas, 'Useless Suffering', p.159.