COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 43: Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, Emmanuel Levinas, Comparative Literature

• School: University of Arkansas-Monticello
• Department: Communication
• Course: COMM 2273
• Professor: Key

Document Summary

At levinas: levinas"s mindset of adopting an unconditional ethical obligation to the other in order to redeem the violence of alterity is internally contradictory and only reinscribes the otherization which it attempts to solve. This is an old story, and one not unique to levinas. If it emerges all the more glaringly in his work, it is because levinas insists so urgently on the necessity of breaking with such a story in the first place, and on the concrete historical reasons for doing so. The insistent recommendation for the absoluteness of this break may be levinas"s greatest contribution to the philosophical tradition, but it may also be precisely what ultimately renders his ethics dangerously self-contradictory and even wholly invalid. As levinas writes, in a passage we have already quoted, "the good can not enter into a present nor be put into a representation.