Can We Learn to Hear Ethical Calls? In Honor of Scott Cameron

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-42
Author(s):  
Christina M. Gschwandtner ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Ethical Response

This article tries to grapple with the difficulty of hearing the call of the other and recognizing it as a call that obligates us to ethical response, especially when such a “call” is not issued by a human other but by other species or environmental precarity more broadly. I briefly review how ethical responsibility is articulated by Emmanuel Lévinas and then consider some of the ways in which his philosophy has been applied to environmental questions. I suggest that while some calls might be obvious and obligate by the blatant need almost impossible to ignore, in many cases a hermeneutic context and predisposition is required in order to “hear” a call and understand it as ethically obligating. I conclude with one example of how it might be possible to inculcate such dispositions that would attune us to more careful hearing and might cause us to recognize ethical obligation.

Feeding the Hungry Other: Levinas, Breastfeeding, and the Politics of Hunger

Hypatia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Lee
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Breastfeeding Promotion ◽  
Quality Food ◽  
Public Health Promotion

Breastfeeding has become a subject of moral concern as its benefits have become well known. Encouraging mothers to breastfeed has been the goal of extensive public health promotion efforts. Emmanuel Levinas makes absolute responsibility to the Other central to his ethics, with giving food to the Other the paradigmatic ethical act. However, Levinas also provides an important critique of the autonomous individual who is taken for granted by breastfeeding promotion efforts. I argue that the ethical obligation to feed the hungry child must be recognized as coextensive with meeting the needs of women, especially given the current absence of important social and economic supports for breastfeeding. Under a Levinasian framework, each of us is ethically responsible for feeding children; this responsibility is not limited to mothers. This ethical responsibility needs to be expressed through improving social and economic supports necessary for those individuals who wish to breastfeed, instead of attempting to convince women to breastfeed. This ethical responsibility must also be understood in a broader context of a politics of hunger, which provides access to quality food for all, and goes beyond mere nutrition to include the importance of culture, touch, and intimacy in the enjoyment of food—what Levinas calls “good soup.”

scholarly journals Etikken i den maskerede by. Om Baumans etiske afvisning af den postmoderne bys æstetisering

2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23
Author(s):  
Lasse Suonperä Liebst
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Urban Sociology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
The City ◽  
Ethical Demand

Artiklen problematiserer Zygmunt Baumans argument om, at æstetiseringen i den postmoderne by er uforenelig med en virksom etisk ansvarlighed for den fremmede i byen. Denne forståelse er kraftigt inspireret af Emmanuel Lévinas’ fænomenologiske nærhedsetik, der forstår æstetik og etik som antagonistiske fænomener. Med afsæt i denne forståelse anser Bauman æstetiseringen af den Anden, som en maskering af det nøgne ansigt, der ifølge Lévinas er den etiske fordrings kilde. Hermed mødes den Anden ikke som et unikt menneske, men snarere som et overfladisk objekt, der nydes uden etisk ansvar. Artiklen peger på, at Knud E. Løgstrups fænomenologiske nærhedsetik – som Bauman fejlagtigt jævnfører med Levinas’ – tilbyder en interessant alternativ forståelse af forholdet imellem æstetik og etik: Ifølge Løgstrup har æstetikken nemlig forrang for etikken. Artiklens afgørende argument bliver i lyset heraf, at den etiske fordring som den Anden stiller, forudsætter at jeg er i kontakt med dennes liv, hvilket netop sker i den æstetiske sansning. Den æstetiske maskering af den Anden kan således ikke per se afskrives som en uetisk objektificering, men rummer snarere potentialet til, at jeg på sanselig-æstetisk vis kommer i stemt nærvær med det liv, der fordrer mig etisk. ENGELSK ABSTRACT: Lasse Suonperä Liebst: Ethics in the Masked City The article questions Zygmunt Bauman’s argument that the aesthetization of the postmodern city is incompatible with the existence of an ethical responsibility towards the stranger in the city. This argument stems from Emmanuel Lévinas’ phenomenological ethics of proximity according to which aesthetical and ethical phenomena are antagonistic. Bauman’s lévinasian argument is based on the assumption that the aesthetization of The Other in the city veils the naked face which, according to Lévinas, is ethically demanding. This way, The Other is not faced as a unique human being, but rather as a masked and fungible object, which can be enjoyed without any responsibility. In this article it is argued that Knud E. Løgstrup’s phenomenological ethics of proximity, which Bauman sees as nearly equivalent to Lévinas’ ethics, offers an alternative theoretical concep-tualization. According to Løgstrup, the aesthetics has primacy over the ethical: The ethical demand of The Other presupposes that I am in contact with the life of The Other which takes place in a sensuous-aesthetic way. The aesthetical masking of The Other, thus, is not per se an unethical objectification, but rather a sensuous way to become ethical demanded by the Other. Key words: Zygmunt Bauman, Knud E. Løgstrup, Emmanuel Lévinas, urban sociology, aesthetization, ethics of proximity.

How might Levinas' concept of the other's priority and Derrida's unconditional hospitality contribute to the philosophy of the modern hospice movement?

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciro Augusto Floriani ◽  
Fermin Roland Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Latin Word ◽  
Phenomenological Experience ◽  
Hospice Movement

AbstractHospitality is commonly referred as one of the meanings of hospes, the Latin word which is also the root of hospice. This article explores the semantics of the word hospice - the seal of identity of modern hospice movement - and attempts to integrate the meaning of hospitality into the modern hospice movement, understood as unconditional reception. Therefore, the article analyzes the concept of unconditional hospitality, developed by Jacques Derrida and that of ethical responsibility proposed by Emmanuel Levinas based on the phenomenological experience of the other. From this point of view, these two concepts tie in with the meaning of hospice, bringing substantial grounding elements to the hospice movement for the construction of a protective ethos.

Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins

Anxiety ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 397-437
Author(s):  
Bettina Bergo
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Emotional Memory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility

Levinas radicalized Heidegger’s hermeneutic moods into intensely embodied states and affects, pointing toward their intersubjective connections. His early work challenged Heidegger’s intellectualist approach to affective tonalities, arguing that our experience of “Being” occurs in bodily modes, from nausea to shame to escapist pleasures. Following his famous treatise on welcoming the “Other” in 1961, he turned to theorize the experience of alterity as first affective; and thereafter in 1974 as anxiety and emotional memory (“the other-in-the-same”). Taking a step outside Husserl’s phenomenology, he located the birth of responsibility for the other in the intersubjective interweave of our lived bodies and affects, and later on as mourning and mnemonic obsession. Since Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy (1923), Levinas’s was the greatest effort, since Kant’s practical reason colored by Achtung, to underscore within phenomenology the connection between specific affects and ethical responsibility.

scholarly journals The Discounted Face of the Pornographic Other

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hoy
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Face ◽  
Ethical Response

French phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas, responds in Ethics and Infinity that, “[T]he relation to the face is straightaway ethical. The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: ‘thou shalt not kill.’” For Levinas, it is the face of the Other which issues a cry that “I” become responsible for her. The face is signification, pointing to the transcendent and saturating mystery of the Other, yet is beyond the reduction of visual perception. It is the objective of this paper to apply Levinasian thought, the ethical response to the face of the Other, to the injustice associated with the production and commodification of pornographic images and videos. As the abuse of pornographic materials is an injustice, a failed response to the cry of the Other, it begs the question, “Does the pornographic Other even possess a face?” Subliminal as it may seem, this question is nonetheless essential to address in the consideration of pornographic injustice. This paper argues that in the case of the abuse and exploitation of the Other within the pornographic industry, the pornographic Other possesses a face which issues a cry to recognize the inviolable mystery of the Other and to become responsible for him or her. Pornography, by its very nature, discounts the face of the Other, not rendering the face unknowable, but never giving the face a chance to be known. From the beginning of the abuse, the pornographic viewer reduces that which cannot be reduced, the face, to an object for use, a direct violation of the ethical cry of the Other. 

scholarly journals Haunted by the Other: Levinas, Derrida and the Persecutory Phantom

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-385
Author(s):  
Michael Burke
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Symbolic Understanding ◽  
Gore Verbinski

In this article, I explore what I call the persecutory trope – which underscores the alterity of the phantom and its relentless haunting and spectral oppression of the protagonists – in recent American ghost films, connecting it to the ethical thought of the continental philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Films like The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2004), It Follows (Robert Mitchell, 2014), and Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012) depict terrifying spectral antagonists whose relentless persecution of the protagonists often defies comprehension and narrative closure. I suggest that these films comprise a specific supernatural subgenre due to the particular way in which their specters haunt the victims. The relentlessness of the spectral assailant, and the foreclosure of actions by which the specter is either expelled from or reintegrated into symbolic understanding of its victim, can be construed in terms of the ethical relationship between the other and the self in the work of Levinas and Derrida. Their focus on the moral agent's responsibility to an other, an obligation that the agent does not undertake voluntarily, entails the spectralization of ethical responsibility insofar as it does not rest on solid, evidential grounds. This article shows how the spectralization of the ethical resonates in recent American ghost films through the disruptive effects of the specter's haunting and responsive mourning enacted by protagonists.

“Like a Maternal Body”: Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses

Hypatia ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Guenther
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
Material Practice ◽  
Wet Nurse

Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a “wet nurse” bearing Others whom he has “neither conceived nor given birth to” (Num. 11:12). A close reading of this passage raises questions about ethics, maternity, and sexual difference, for both the concept of ethical substitution and the material practice of mothering.

scholarly journals Traducir el rostro del otro: encuentros culturales entre Judith Butler y Emmanuel Levinas

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-295
Author(s):  
Pablo Pérez Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Social Landscape ◽  
The Face ◽  
Responsibility Ethics

Judith Butler draws on Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics in order to question processes of humanization and dehumanization taking place through various practices of representation of the face of the other. This is a singular reading leading Levinas’ work to the field of media representations conceived as an agonistic social landscape where the demand of the face is offered or, on the contrary, hidden from us. In that sense, Butler’s cultural transposition of Levinasian ethics entails a politicization of ethics which is indistinguishable, at the end, from an ethic assault to the politics of representation. In this cultural bond among ethics and politics arise fundamental questions on responsibility linking it to the practice of cultural translation while offering alternatives to some common universalist shortcuts of contemporary ethical reflection.Keywords: Cultural translation, ethical responsibility, ethics of alterity.

scholarly journals (Re)reading Acculturation Process in Multicultural Space of Zadie Smith’s NW

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 11-17
Author(s):  
Maryam Shokouhi ◽  
Kaihan Bahmani ◽  
Leila Baradaran Jamili
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Ethical Philosophy ◽  
Acculturation Process ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
The Impact

The present study seeks to delineate the impact of the Other on the acculturative options of the diasporic minorities in the multicultural space of Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). The extent to which the selected characters can be successful in acculturation process to experience conviviality and escape from ethnic absolutism will be discussed by taking an ethico-socio-cultural approach. The interdisciplinary approach includes ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Gilroy’s socio-cultural critique of contemporary multiculturalism in Britain, and John Widdup Berry’s acculturation theories. This article attempts to demonstrate not recognizing the Other’s difference can be the main cause of the failure of multiculturalism. Time in its philosophical and temporal sense is associated with race to evoke the way past can lead to the present inter-subjectivity breakdown; moreover, the role of ethical responsibility in the subjects’ acculturation process will be addressed.

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