Alterity in Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Levinas: From Ambiguity to Ambivalence

Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Valerie Giovanini
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Ethical Relation ◽  
Male Privilege ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Normative Standards ◽  
Free Thought

This article is meant to stage an encounter, a kind of rendezvous, between Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir regarding how alterity seems to enable an ethical relation for Levinas while closing one for Beauvoir. I will argue that Beauvoir's reading of Levinas on “the other” is not a charitable one, and the ethical ambivalence in Levinas's notion of alterity can motivate the praxis Beauvoir seeks for undoing social forms of oppression. I will start with Beauvoir's interpretation of alterity as “feminine otherness” in Levinas's ethics that, for her, originates in the violent perspective of male privilege. Then I will move to Levinas's response to this critique in a set of interviews with Philip Nemo, and to consideration of how a more charitable reading of alterity, understood as a sort of ambivalence in the structure of subjectivity, creates a close proximity between Levinas's and Beauvoir's ethics of action. I contend that both Beauvoir and Levinas respectively developed their ethics of action, either of ambiguity or of ambivalent alterity, in order to free thought from the absolute seriousness with which normative standards are held.

scholarly journals Against "the European Notion of Man": Levinas, Freedom, and the Responsible Body

PhaenEx ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 76-99
Author(s):  
KATHY J. KILOH
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Relation ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Racist Ideology ◽  
Early Essay ◽  
Clear Description

Emmanuel Levinas’ early essay “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” provides us with a clear description what Levinas’ conception of subjectivity as a lived, bodily experience rejects: “the European notion of man” (7). This paper traces the argument Levinas presents in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” providing links between this early essay and Levinas’ later, major works: Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. The political interrogation of liberalism at the heart of Levinas’ depiction of the subject as creaturely and his discussion of subjectivity as substitution is revealed by orienting the later works towards “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Levinas’ description of the ethical relation between myself and all the others locates both my freedom and my responsibility to the other in the inseparable unity of body and spirit. As creatures, and as subjects in substitution, we experience our own freedom as dependent upon our responsibility for the others; unlike the subject of liberalism, the Levinasian subject cannot conform to the racist ideology promoted by the philosophy of Hiterlism without renouncing its own freedom.

Hegel’sOffene: Apperception, Absolution and the Absolute

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-187
Author(s):  
Joshua Wretzel
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Free Thought ◽  
The One

AbstractThis paper offers a limited defence of two seemingly disparate interpretive approaches to free thought in Hegel’s JenaPhenomenology of Spirit. On the one hand, I defend the view of so-called post-Kantian Hegelians, that Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception is central to Hegel’s account of free thinking in thePhenomenology. On the other hand, I argue that the notions ofdas Offenein Heidegger’sVom Wesen der WahrheitandAb-Lösungin his 1930/31 lectures on Hegel’sPhenomenologyare no less crucial to an understanding of free thought in Hegel’s work. I show that absolution is a condition for the possibility ofdas Offene, which is a condition for the possibility of apperception in its reflexive capacity.

scholarly journals A Levinasian Ethics of Attention

Phainomenon ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 18-19 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Michael Marder
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Relation ◽  
Ethical Foundation ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
The One

Abstract In his rather fragmentary theory of attention, Emmanuel Levinas draws inspiration from phenomenology, while endeavoring to furnish it with an ethical foundation. On ·the one hand, he assigns to attention a crucial role coextensive with intentionality (the idea that, in each case, consciousness is consdous of, or directed toward, something). On the other hand, he mobilizes the methodology of reduction for the purpose of uncovering an ethical substratum of experience in the relation to the Other, which is deeper still than the life of consciousness it animates. Husserlian reduction is not radical enough for Levinas’s philosophical taste, since it fails to recognize. that this life comes into being thanks to the appeal emanating from the Other, whose calling out to me forces me to pay attention, even when it seems that I am attending only to inanimate things. The ethical relation to the Other lies not only at the bottom of all social and political structures, but also at the source of consciousness and of its attentive directedness to that of which it is conscious. Before I am able to intend or to attend to anything whatsoever, I am targeted by the Other, who reverses the movement of intentionality and, at once, breaches and founds my psychic interiority.

scholarly journals L’art, entre jouissance et utopie selon Emmanuel Levinas

2022 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-141
Author(s):  
Rodolphe Olcèse
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Ethical Relation ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
The Moment

This text aims to show how, in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the moment of jouissance is constitutive of the selfhood of the ego and conditions the very possibility of a sensitivity to the other man, and so the possibility of the ethical relation itself. These considerations on the enjoyment invited us to think artistic creation and poetry as a way to respond to anesthesia of our sensibility through knowledge, which is a characteristic of western thought for Emmanuel Levinas.

scholarly journals Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguity of Childhood

Paragraph ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clémentine Beauvais
Keyword(s):  
Adult Child ◽  
The Other ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Ethical Relation ◽  
Child Relationship

This article explores Simone de Beauvoir's conceptualization of childhood and its importance for her existentialist thought. Beauvoir's theorization of childhood, I argue, offers a sophisticated portrayal of the child and of the adult–child relationship: the child is not a normal ‘other’ for the adult, but what I call a temporal other, perceived by adults as an ambiguous being; in turn, childhood is conceptualized as the origin of the ambiguity of adulthood. This foregrounding of childhood has important implications for Beauvoir's existentialism, in particular regarding her ethics. Through the adult–child relationship, her vision of an ethical relation to otherness emerges — one which foregrounds both the violence and the mutual liberation involved in encounters with the other.

scholarly journals A RELAÇÃO ÉTICA COMO RELIGIÃO EM EMMANUEL LÉVINAS

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (119) ◽  
pp. 383
Author(s):  
Márcio Antônio de Paiva ◽  
José Geraldo Estevam
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Relation ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
The Face

O texto apresenta o sentido original da religião desvelado pela relação ética na qual o rosto do outro manifesta o vestígio de Deus que vem à ideia sem que esta consiga tematizá-lo ou conhecê-lo. Nessa perspectiva, a filosofia deve ser desdita constantemente por um dizer ético, conforme o propõe Lévinas.Abstract: The paper presents the original meaning of religion unveiled by the ethical relation in which the face of the other expresses the trace of God that emerges without, however, making it possible to thematize or to know Him. From this perspective, and as it is proposed by Levinas, philosophy must constantly be unsaid by an ethical saying.

Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Individuation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Hengehold
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Other ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World

Most studies of Simone de Beauvoir situate her with respect to Hegel and the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology begun by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This book analyzes The Second Sex in light of the concepts of becoming, problematization, and the Other found in Gilles Deleuze. Reading Beauvoir through a Deleuzian lens allows more emphasis to be placed on Beauvoir's early interest in Bergson and Leibniz, and on the individuation of consciousness, a puzzle of continuing interest to both phenomenologists and Deleuzians. By engaging with the philosophical issues in her novels and student diaries, this book rethinks Beauvoir’s focus on recognition in The Second Sex in terms of women’s struggle to individuate themselves despite sexist forms of representation. It shows how specific forms of women’s “lived experience” can be understood as the result of habits conforming to and resisting this sexist “sense.” Later feminists put forward important criticisms regarding Beauvoir’s claims not to be a philosopher, as well as the value of sexual difference and the supposedly Eurocentric universalism of her thought. Deleuzians, on the other hand, might well object to her ideas about recognition. This book attempts to address those criticisms, while challenging the historicist assumptions behind many efforts to establish Beauvoir’s significance as a philosopher and feminist thinker. As a result, readers can establish a productive relationship between Beauvoir’s “problems” and those of women around the world who read her work under very different circumstances.

The World after the End of the World

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kas Saghafi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
End Of The World

In several late texts, Derrida meditated on Paul Celan's poem ‘Grosse, Glühende Wölbung’, in which the departure of the world is announced. Delving into the ‘origin’ and ‘history’ of the ‘conception’ of the world, this paper suggests that, for Derrida, the end of the world is determined by and from death—the death of the other. The death of the other marks, each and every time, the absolute end of the world.

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