scholarly journals A Virtual Dialogue between Gandhi and Levinas

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 422
Author(s):  
Ephraim Meir
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mahatma Gandhi ◽  
Mutual Learning ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Many

Mahatma Gandhi and Emmanuel Levinas have much in common. They interpret religion in a radical ethical way and develop an ethical hermeneutics of religious sources. Levinas’s thoughts on a holy history, not to be confused with history, are comparable with Gandhi’s swaraj as the spiritual independence and self-transformation of India. Escaping war logics, they maintain a “beyond the state” in the state and insert ethics in politics. Yet, Gandhi’s ethico-politics works with radical interrelatedness, whereas Levinas differentiates more between the self and the other. Gandhi trusted that, in the end, the good would vanquish evil. Levinas, in turn, did not venture into the future: the present was under “eschatological judgment.” Gandhi’s love of the enemy and his attempt to soften the opponent’s heart are absent in Levinas’s metaphysics. In addition, Levinas does not radically deconstruct the term self-defense, although Gandhi notoriously made also exceptions to his ahimsa. A dialogue can be established between Levinas’s ethical metaphysics and Gandhi’s ahimsa and satyagraha. Both thinkers make a radical critique of a peace based on rational contracts and equate peace with universal brother- and sisterhood. Without underestimating the many similarities between Levinas and Gandhi, I also highlight their dissimilarities. I argue that precisely the differences between both thinkers allow for a “trans-different” dialogue, which respects specificities and promotes communication, in a movement of hospitality and mutual learning.

scholarly journals The identity/alterity nexus in international relations: two cases of encounter with difference

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-247
Author(s):  
Erica Resende
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Different Levels

The aim of this article is to survey the implications of the identity/alterity nexus in international relations (IR) as related to processes of othering for understanding conflict and violence in global politics. I will offer what I could call an ontology of difference in global politics, where I stress the reliance of understanding othering practices in global politics, as I explore two cases from which I ask the following questions: How do identity and identity formation processes occur and develop at different levels, times and dimensions? How do discourses of differentiation and identification help construct state identities and interests? Following Emmanuel Lévinas, I will argue that by seeking ways to reach out towards the Other, we free ourselves from the restraints of selfishness, from indifference and isolation. Finding and coming to terms with a composition of the Self that also includes the Other enables us to take responsibility for him/her inasmuch it prevents the conditions for violence and conflict.

Comparing the incomparable and legal discourse

Semiotica ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (209) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Augusto Ponzio
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Absolute Difference ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Law

AbstractIt is not with the State that personal responsibility arises towards the other. According to Emmanuel Levinas, the other is every single human being I am responsible for, and I am this responsibility for him. The other, my fellow, is the first comer. But I do not live in a world with just one single “first comer”; there is always another other, a third, who is also my other, my fellow. Otherness, beginning with this third, is a plurality. Proximity as responsibility is a plurality. There is a need for justice. There is the obligation to compare unique and incomparable others. This is what is hidden, unsaid, implied in legal discourse. But recourse to comparison among that which cannot be compared, among that which is incomparable is justified by love of justice for the other. It is this justification that confers a sense to law, which is always dura lex, and to the statement that citizens are equal before the law. From this point of view, State justice is always imperfect with respect to human rights understood as the rights of the other, of every other in his absolute difference, in his incomparable otherness.

Tracing Sexual Difference

1998 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Pamela Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Difference

A reading of Luce Irigaray suggests the possibility of tracing sexual difference in philosophical accounts of personal identity. In particular, I argue that Irigaray raises the possibility of moving beyond the aporia of the other which lies at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's account of self-identity. My contention is that the self conceived in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another is male insofar as it is dependent upon the patriarchal monotheism which has shaped Western culture both socially and economically. Nevertheless there remains the possibility of developing Ricoeur's reference to 'the trace of the Other' in order to give a non-essential meaning to sexual difference. Such meaning will emerge when (i) both men and women have identities as subjects, and (ii) the difference between them can be expressed. I aim to elucidate both conditions by appropriating Irigaray's 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.'

“I” and the “Other”

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petrus Van Ewijk
Keyword(s):  
Alcoholics Anonymous ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Language Game ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
I And Thou ◽  
To Come

In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the presence of Alcoholics Anonymous can be considered as an attempt to come up with a solution for both the addiction and the solipsism of the characters. AA tries to accomplish this by reconnecting the addict with the “Other”. The assimilation of the “Other” by the totalizing tendency of the self is dropped in favor of an earnest connection. This article focuses on the similarities between AA’s methods, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of the language-game, Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of the “Other” and Martin Buber’s I and Thou. It illustrates how, in light of this knowledge, a reader might be able to uncover moments of earnestness in Infinite Jest, as well as pick up on the rules necessary to counter contemporary American solitude.

F.H. Bradley: An Unpublished Note on Christian Morality

1983 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Kendal
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Moral View ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
Moral Importance ◽  
Unpublished Note

At some time between 1907 and 1912, probably very much nearer the earlier date, Bradley produced the first draft of an article on Christian morality. He did this in response to criticism that his moral ideas were anti-Christian. This charge was based mainly on the content of two articles that he published during 1894 in the International Journal of Ethics, one called ‘Some Remarks on Punishment’ and the other ‘The Limits of Individual and National Self-Sacrifice’. In these Bradley had maintained that the conventional ‘Christian’ belief in the sacredness of life undermined any sensible approach to punishment and any clear understanding of the moral importance of self-assertion (in contrast to self-sacrifice). It encouraged a squeamishness about retribution and ‘social surgery’. It devalued proper human ends and interests, and the rights and duties founded on them. There was needed ‘a correction of our moral view, and a return to a non-Christian and perhaps a Hellenic ideal’, one that would recognize the unlimited right of the moral organism (i.e. virtually the state) to dispose of its members and to use force internationally in defence of right. Bradley pulled no punches and had this to say about the self-styled ‘Christian’ party:

scholarly journals The Enigmatic Nature of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-154
Author(s):  
Moez Marrouchi
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Established Order

Prospero in Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, written around 1611 and first published seven years after the dramatist’s death, in 1623, is not a duke who has failed in his task of ruling, but a man who has gained power to direct and discipline others. To that sense, he tends to be the god-man like who rightly castigates and strictly scourges. The magician appears to be so humane at times and too harsh at other times that he dazzles, leads astray or terrifies the island’s dwellers, an ambivalent mission that further intensifies the enigmatic nature of the play. While he has intentionally raised a storm to cause the disorder of the drunken sailors' minds and bodies, thus leaving them on shore at the mercy of chance, instead of winds and waves as before, he has laboriously established order towards the end of the play. Prospero's white magic helps him bring together characters speaking their true character irrespective of their social classes: princes, courtiers, and sailors. When disharmony begets harmony, humanism emerges from the tragi-comic elements, and when the concept of colonization exists, it strikingly embodies the notion of resistance, where the relationship between the self and the other, the centralized and the marginalized, is perhaps blurred. Such are some of the facets the reader is presented with in The Tempest. This paper is yet an attempt to explore the many facets of Shakespeare’s last masterpiece. Within the framework of being a keynote to harmony, the paper would study the play in light of humanism, colonialism, drama genres and other aspects.

Man is a Wolf to Man1

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Still
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Fruit And Vegetables ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Natural Man

This focuses on Derrida’s analysis of the figure of the wolf in the first volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, particularly in La Fontaine’s fables (where the wolf can represent the sovereign as well as the outlaw) and in political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably Hobbes’s De Cive and Rousseau’s Discourses. This is developed with reference to other texts of the period such as the Encyclopédie in which wolves are represented as man’s enemies, rivals for scarce resources, notably food. The wolf is typically evoked as solitary and hungry; for Hobbes he, like man in the state of nature, is dangerous. For Rousseau, on the other hand, both wolf and pre-social man are shy rather than violent, preferring flight to fight – and food is naturally abundant for natural man who would in any case prefer fruit and vegetables to meat. The politics of food and taste are critical both in the self-fulfilling prophecy that man will become a wolf to man, and in the extermination of wolves.

Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov’s Morphine (2008)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Self Organisation ◽  
The Continuum

Balabanov’s Morphine is concerned with cultural memory conceived as a continuum; not as identity but rather subjectivity in construction. The concepts relates to Badiou’s study of subjectivity. It determines existence in a world where the horizon of knowledge is always disappearing and is never available to us in its integrity whereby the subject is barred from the infinite. Different directions and speeds of movement generate the transcendental subject in that the subject is in relation to the variations of the lived. One of such states implies a continuum, or becoming without determination, whilst the other, refers to the imperative to construct knowledge out of the elements of the continuum. Such assemblages, rituals and rites allow the subject to access the ‘beyond’, a different realm, where the elements of the past are positioned towards the future. The transcendence of the subject is coded as an unstoppable flow of imagery—a hallucination—divided into sequences by reiterations and references to the cultural discourse: an introspective vision produces not self-organisation but self-destruction as the subject becomes aware of its own infiniteness. I showcase how Balabanov’s Morphine captures the brutality of such openings and the self-annihilating impact of nothingness.

Lawful War of Self-Defense

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yishai Beer
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Issue ◽  
Military Doctrine ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
The Law ◽  
Imminent Threat ◽  
The Right ◽  
Military Professionalism

This chapter deals with the application of the suggested professionalism criterion in the other segment of the law, the ad bellum sphere. An unresolved legal issue in the self-defense context concerns its timing: When can a self-defendant state be proactive in its defense and strike preemptively? On the assumption that a self-defendant is not obliged to remain a sitting duck when confronted by an imminent threat against it, this chapter suggests that the criterion to be used in defining the legal-timing threshold, vindicating the right of self-defense, be taken from the toolbox of military professionalism. It should be the last reasonable point, according to the self-defendant’s military circumstances, at which it can, according to its military doctrine, successfully face the aggressor’s threat and still operationally defend itself—including, when necessary, by taking the initiative in its own self-defense.

From the Star to the Disaster

Paragraph ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 84-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Hart
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The One

Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption comes before the Shoah and Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster comes after it. The one addresses itself with hope to the figure of a star; the other meditates on the state of being without a guiding star. The figure of Emmanuel Levinas stands between these two works, since Totality and Infinity is marked by Rosenzweig's critique of totality and The Writing of the Disaster is in part a response to Levinas's philosophy. Both Rosenzweig and Blanchot propose a new way of thinking, one that calls unity into question. This essay seeks to clarify what ‘thought’ means for Rosenzweig and for Blanchot. In what ways do Rosenzweig and Blanchot converge? In what ways do they diverge?

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