A Chronology of Levinas’s Metaphorics Cowen Verter, Mitchell
Acta Universitatis Carolinae. Interpretationes,
2020, Volume:
10, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Open access
Many readers of Emmanuel Levinas understand his thought as being oriented only by transcendence and therefore denigrate the immanent dimension of metaphor within his texts. Such readings reduce the ...complexities of Levinas’s text to a set of polemical, orthodox proclamations such as The Other is Most High and Ethics is First Philosophy. However, Levinas’s work invites us to contemplate not only transcendence, but also the way that immanence emerges though relationships with an infinitude of others, third persons whose voices murmur within the system of language, articulated in concrete elements such as metaphor. Levinas employs metaphor to converse with the inherited ways that temporal becoming has been articulated, recurrently reorienting them to expose a variety of ethical-phenomenological constellations. To expose the dynamics that remain clandestine to the orthodox interpretation, this paper will chronologically trace the development of various families of metaphors such as those of having and doing; those of dimensionality, those of orality, those of familiarity, and those of birth, gender, and death, thereby demonstrating the multitude of roles and perspectival positions assumed by the subject during its temporal becoming.
The concept of “utopia” appears in Marc Richir’s first article in 1968. Although Richir does not ever explicitly claim it, it nevertheless plays a very fundamental role in his thought, particularly ...in the political field. By analyzing the different layers of meaning that characterize the human community, from the most established to the most archaic, we would like to defend the idea that what he calls in Du sublime en politique “utopian sociality” or even “the utopian community” is in truth the register of transcendental interfacticity. To do this, we will have to explain in what and how the socio-political link differs from the links of transcendental intersubjectivity and interfacticity. We will argue that, for Richir, it is phantasia and affectivity that hold the political community together. We will then explore what role transcendental interfacticity plays in the field of politics, more particularly in its articulation with the declination of absolute transcendence into political transcendence.
Sartre and Levinas both described the relation to the other referring to Descartes’ idea of the infinite. Comparing these two phenomenologies sheds a light on the great influence Sartre had on ...Levinas’ ethics. While the two philosophers agree that the other is « a hole in the world » in the sense that he negates my intentionality, they fundamentally differ on the ultimate meaning of this negation. Following the thread of the Cartesian idea of the infinite, this article deciphers Levinas’ critique of Sartre, leading to his ethics of the face.
The goal of this essay is to suggest some elements for a phenomenological critique of ideology, based on the philosophy of affectivity proposed by Maine de Biran at the beginning of the XIX century. ...It also draws on the work of the Belgian phenomenologist Marc Richir, who developed some of the concepts postulated by Maine de Biran into a theory of intersubjective affectivity centered on the concept of contagion. The last part is an attempt to use these concepts for a critical analysis of the influence advertisements have on our affective disposition and how said influence modifies our phenomenological comprehension of the world.
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.
This paper intends to analyze the question of the embodied subjectivity in Emmanuel Levinas’s work, starting from a specific point of view: the controversial reception of Husserl’s phenomenology. In ...the early period of his confrontation with Husserl, Levinas criticizes the excess of theoreticism in transcendental idealism. However, he then seems to discover right inside of it the conditions to bring the philosophical debate out of the limits of knowledge theory. This is when he recognizes the important role played by the body in the husserlian description of the act of sense-giving (Sinngebung). Though, while praising Husserl for his conception of sensibility – as the “Commentaires nouveaux” clearly show – Levinas actually proceeds to an original rethinking of the meaning of incarnation, beyond the purity of the ego, and the supposed “property” of the flesh.
The purpose of this article is the phenomenological description of theatrical performance throughout the revision of some of the key-concepts of Hans Thies-Lehmann’s and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s ...reception theories from the perspective of Marc Richir’s thought concerning the architectonical transposition of experiencing. This revision includes the Freudian concept of “evenly hovering attention” (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit) that Lehmann describes as the spectator’s optimal disposition of reception, and the concept of “perceptual multistability” which in Fischer-Lichte’s theory is meant to outline the spectator’s instability in the perception of the actor and the represented character. I will rethink the phenomenalization of the above mentioned phenomena primarily by introducing Marc Richir’s thoughts concerning the primacy of phantasia over perception and his description of the experience of the sublime. I will argue that the phenomenon of theatrical performance (in several cases) can be the ground of a collectively performed act of symbolic and aesthetic Stiftung.
The purpose of this article is the phenomenological description of theatrical performance throughout the revision of some of the key-concepts of Hans Thies-Lehmann’s and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s ...reception theories from the perspective of Marc Richir’s thought concerning the architectonical transposition of experiencing. This revision includes the Freudian concept of “evenly hovering attention” (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit) that Lehmann describes as the spectator’s optimal disposition of reception, and the concept of “perceptual multistability” which in Fischer-Lichte’s theory is meant to outline the spectator’s instability in the perception of the actor and the represented character. I will rethink the phenomenalization of the above mentioned phenomena primarily by introducing Marc Richir’s thoughts concerning the primacy of phantasia over perception and his description of the experience of the sublime. I will argue that the phenomenon of theatrical performance (in several cases) can be the ground of a collectively performed act of symbolic and aesthetic Stiftung.
