Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics

by Llewelyn; John

• ISBN13: 9780415107297
• ISBN10: 0415107296
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-07-31
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

From the relative obscurity in which Levinas's work languished until very recently, Emmanuel Levinas must now be judged as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Continental philosophy. There is no better guide than John Lewelyn to lead one through the thickets of Levinas's prose. Bursting with questions, multiple references, cascading citations and multilingual puns and nuances, this book is the compelling record of intellectual obsession. Taking as its guiding thre the theme of genealogy, the book gives a broadly chronological and impressively manageable presentation of the whole sweep of the Levinas's work. Balanced and finely grained, Llewelyn confronts questions of method, Heidegger, phenomenology, the theme of sensibility, religion, enjoyment, feminity, eros, justice and the political. The book reaches a stunning climax in a series of chapters that give a hestitant but tolerant discussion of the question of God in Levinas, the relation to Levinasian ethics to Nietzscheangenealogy, and an extraordinary discussion of metaphor that leads into a wholly original analysis of Levinas's poetics and metaphorics. The book concludes with a sensitive reading of the autobiographical epigraphs to Levinas'sOtherwise than Being...and a consideration of the Holocaust.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
	p. 7
Ontological Claustrophobia	p. 9
Ontic Accomplishment	p. 21
Before Time	p. 31
Announcing Time	p. 42
Announcing the Other	p. 51
	p. 61
Being Faced	p. 63
Before and Beyond the Face	p. 77
The Manifold of Alterity	p. 89
From Sensibility to Sense	p. 100
Generations	p. 112
	p. 135
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity	p. 137
Atheology	p. 149
Anthology	p. 162
Tropes	p. 180
Ethical Agoraphobia	p. 199
Notes	p. 214
Bibliography	p. 229
Index	p. 233
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