La politique comme le lieu de l’universalisation de l’exigence éthique chez Levinas

Levinasian philosophy is characterized as a philosophy of ethical subjectivity and asymmetrical responsibility. Ethics is understood as the subject that gives itself entirely to the Other. However, the Other is never alone. His face attests to the presence of a third party who, looking at me in his eyes, cries for justice. There is no longer any question for the subject to devote himself entirely to the Other (ethical justice), to give everything to him at the risk of appearing empty-handed before the third party. How then to serve both the Other and the third party? The question of the political appears in the thought of Levinas with the emergence of the third party who, like the Other, challenges me and commands me (social justice). The third party establishes a political space. Politics is in the final analysis the place of the universalization of the ethical requirement born from face-to-face with the face of the Other.

Posthuman Media Studies

In connection with emerging scholarship in the digital humanities, media genealogy, and informational ontology, this paper begins the process of articulating a posthuman approach to media studies. Specifically, this project sheds new light on how posthuman ethics, ontology, and epistemology can be applied in order to develop new methodologies for media studies. Each of these approaches builds upon the foundation of an informational ontology, which avoids the necessity for pre-existing subjects that transmit messages to one another within a cybernetic paradigm. Instead, a posthuman paradigm explores methods that include counter-actualization, modulation, and counter-memory. Posthuman media studies emphasizes the need for experimentation in developing new processes of subjectivation and embraces an affirmative posthuman nomadic ethical subjectivity, linking true critique to true creation.

Prophetic Subjectivity in Later Levinas

This paper explores how Levinas redefines the traditional notion of prophecy shifting the emphasis from the content of prophecy to the figure of the prophet, thus making prophetic inspiration a key feature of ethical subjectivity. The principal aim of the paper is to analyse the resulting triangular structure involving God and the Other. This structure is inherently unstable because God is incessantly stepping back in kenotic withdrawal. I show how this fundamental instability is reflected in the structure of the phenomenalisation of God’s glory, the structure of obedience to God’s order, and the structure of the authorship of prophecy. The prophetic experience is marked by heterogeneity; it can never be completely appropriated. Responsibility for the Other brings the subject to light as a witness of the glory of the Infinite, but not as the subject of selfidentification.

Nancy and the Idea of “Being-in-common”: An Alternative Existentiality for the Subjectivity

The aim of this article is to look at the discussion of the singularity in Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy as a quest to imagine a new concept of a common existence that negates the differentiation between “I” and the “other.” In the age of subjectivity, the main indicator of existence is the “subjectivity” that differs from the contingency and perceives itself as a whole in its autonomous singularity. This singularity-centralized perception of existence causes the negation of the being of the otherness and its ethical being that is the core element of establishing the subjectivity. Nancy, one of the leading philosophers offering new approaches on ethical subjectivity, tries to reflect upon a new idea about community (which is called in Nancy’s philosophy “being-in-common”), where the subjects can open themselves to the otherness. This article aims to claim that the idea of “being-in-common” is the only ethical opportunity to overcome the crisis that results from the sense of existence reduced to subjectivity. In Nancy’s thought, the ethical possibility of being-in-common should be interiorized within the concept of a communist democracy. A communist democracy is an opening of the being to its perfectibility in which the otherness is ontologically placed within the idea of the community.

Thinking-of-the-Animal-Other with Emmanuel Levinas

This article situates the texts in which Emmanuel Levinas directly addresses questions of animality against the backdrop of his larger oeuvre and argues that, despite an explicit attempt to arrange a privileged ethical (dis)position for humans, Levinas' ethical logic opens onto a deeper conception of ethics without boundaries or a priori content. Juxtaposing Levinas' ethical subjectivity with the relational structure underlying the prominent models of animal rights, it proceeds to examine the implications of Levinas' ethics for a theory of animal rights. The article concludes that Levinas' theory is not logically consistent with a thematisation of the ethical claims of animals in the language of rights and that it is best utilised as a framework within which to deconstruct the inherent anthropocentric character of current models of animal rights.

Critical Posthumanism in Education

Critical posthumanism in education proposes a response to the looming ecological disaster by developing an ethical subjectivity of relatedness. It points to the devastating and unsustainable effects of human-centered domination of “lesser” humans, the nonhuman living, and the environment resulting in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a posthumanist boundary condition that exploits powers from multiple heterogenous entities and that approaches the limit of sustainable living. Critical posthumanism is a timely and positive intervention that criticizes the forms of domination originating from humanism and from other posthumanisms. These dominating powers result in the dehumanizing and environmentally devastating effects of techno- and bio-capitalism. Posthumanist critique is an affirmative ethical process that asserts the vibrancy of matter and life. It is based on an ethics of assembling, the principle of becoming sustainable of the more-than-human world. While critical posthumanism acknowledges that the analysis of the effects of power is important, it realizes that a difference can only be made when the entanglement of humans with all the living and nonliving others is fully recognized. Critical posthumanist education consists of experiments that explore how subjectivities could be opened to the affects of multiple others in the joyful processes of mutual becoming. The enhancement of affective relations “queery” humanity as such, identities, divisions such as “gender” and “race”, binaries such as human-animal, human-nature and human-technology. To promote mutual becoming, education produces subjectivities that are vigilant to the new ways the Capitalocene (“society of control”) both appropriates and suppresses the vitality of assemblages and the creativity of becomings.

Catering to Otherness: Levinasian Consumer Ethics at Restaurant Day

There is a rich tradition of inquiry in consumer research into how collective consumption manifests in various forms and contexts. While this literature has shown how group cohesion prescribes ethical and moral positions, our study explores how ethicality can arise from consumers and their relations in a more emergent fashion. To do so, we present a Levinasian perspective on consumer ethics through a focus on Restaurant Day, a global food carnival that is organized by consumers themselves. Our ethnographic findings highlight a non-individualistic way of approaching ethical subjectivity that translates into acts of catering to the needs of other people and the subversion of extant legislation by foregrounding personal responsibility. These findings show that while consumer gatherings provide participants a license to temporarily subvert existing roles, they also allow the possibility of ethical autonomy when the mundane rules of city life are renegotiated. These sensibilities also create ‘ethical surplus’, which is an affective excess of togetherness. In the Levinasian register, Restaurant Day thus acts as an inarticulable ‘remainder’—a trace of the possibility of being able to live otherwise alongside one another in city contexts.