In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the Eighteenth CenturyMelvyn New, Robert Bernasconi, Richard A. Cohen Texas Tech University Press, 2001 - 420 pages In a world in which everything is reduced "to the play of signs detached from what is signified," Levinas asks a deceptively simple question: Whence, then, comes the urge to question injustice? By seeing the demand for justice for the other—the homeless, the destitute—as a return to morality, Levinas escapes the suspect finality of any ideology.Levinas’s question is one starting point for In Proximity, a collection of seventeen essays by scholars in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, history, and religion, and their readings of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, and Mendelssohn. The title In Proximity alone speaks volumes about Levinas’s philosophy and its relevance today. "If it is true that we are, through technology, moving closer and closer to one another," writes editor Melvyn New, then "the importance of proximity and our response to it cannot be overstated." For the contributors to this volume, the question of whether we may, ethically, appropriate the object of study for our own causes has become vital. Levinas asks us to see ourselves, our own reading, "in proximity" to what is not ourselves, not our understanding of the world.The dialogue created among the essays themselves establishes an enormous diversity of texts and ideologies to which Levinas can contribute something of significant value. At a time when the secondary literature on Levinas and his work is expanding explosively, the cross-disciplinary voices gathered together in In Proximity come at precisely the right time. |
Contents
Levinas Reads Spinoza | 3 |
Levinas on Spinozas Misunderstanding of Judaism | 23 |
Race and Ethics in Levinas and Behn | 53 |
What is Orientation in Thinking? Facing the Facts in Robinson Crusoe | 69 |
Abrahams Odyssey | 91 |
Reading Sterne through Proust and Levinas | 111 |
From the Ethics of the Face to the Aesthetics of Unrepresentability | 141 |
Encounters in Ithaca with Kant and Diderot | 167 |
Levinas Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and the Compulsion of the Good | 215 |
Moses Mendelssohns Jerusalem from Levinass Perspective | 243 |
On the Question of Autonomy and Heteronomy | 261 |
Kant and the Problem of Ethical Metaphysics | 285 |
Levinass Defense of Heteronomy | 303 |
Levinas and Kant | 327 |
Making a Habit of the Sublime | 355 |
393 | |
Common terms and phrases
according to Levinas aesthetic argues auton autonomy becomes Bildungsroman Bramine's Journal calls categorical imperative Christian claim command concept consciousness CPrR criticism critique Crusoe death desire difference Difficult Freedom discourse Duquesne University eighteenth century Eliza Emmanuel Levinas encounter Enlightenment essay experience face fact feeling Goethe Goethe's heteronomy honor human idea ideal imperative infinite Jewish Jews Judaism Kant Kant's Kantian language Laurence Sterne Levinas writes Levinas's Levinasian Lotte means Mendelssohn Merteuil Metaphysics Mignon mind moral law nature notion novel object Odysseus one's oneself ontology Oroonoko person philosophy politics possible practical reason precisely principle Proust proximity question rational reading religion responsibility reveals Robert Bernasconi sense sensibility Sentimental Journey sexual Simon Critchley social soul Spinoza Sterne Sterne's sublime suggests Talmudic theory thought tion Totality and Infinity tradition trans transcendence transcendental truth understand University Press violence Werther Wilhelm Wordsworth Yorick
References to this book
Hawthorne's Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement Clark Davis Limited preview - 2005 |