Levinas Unhinged - Softcover

Sparrow, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178279056X ISBN 13: 9781782790563

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, problems which not only trouble scholars, but which haunt anyone who insists that the material of existence is the beginning and end of existence itself.
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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Tom Sparrow teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania, and blogs at Plastic Bodies.
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Tom Sparrow teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania, and blogs at Plastic Bodies.
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Levinas Unhinged

By Tom Sparrow

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2012 Tom Sparrow
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-056-3

Contents

Preface: Haunting Levinas..................................................
1
1. Darkest Hours...........................................................
9
2. The Spectator's Shadow..................................................
22
3. Aesthetic Identity......................................................
43
4. Strange Ecology.........................................................
73
5. Complexions.............................................................
84
6. Plastic Subjects........................................................
122

CHAPTER 1

Darkest Hours

Introduction

Absent a comprehensive history of darkness and the night asphilosophical metaphors, a history that would match the well-documentedubiquity of light as a metaphor, what I will say hereabout Levinas's deployment of the night could seem like littlemore than an ahistorical curiosity. But Levinas's analysis of thenight is situated within at least three lines of thinking in thehistory of philosophy, each of which is tied to the Platonic legacy.And insofar as Levinas's discourse on the night contests thislegacy's exultation of light and illumination—that is, contests theimagery which constitutes the very discourse of the Westernphilosophical tradition—we can regard his thinking as, in acertain sense, counter-philosophical. The following remarksattempt to elucidate this counter-philosophical tendency and, ina modest way, contribute to what would be the conceptualhistory of the night. Levinas's 1947 text Existence and Existentsprovides the primary reference point.

The three lines of thinking entered by Levinas's discourse onthe night are: (1) the history of light as philosophical metaphor;(2) the history of ontology or metaphysics; and (3) the turn to thebody in the twentieth century. It is with this latter trajectory thatI am primarily concerned, and it is my interest in Levinas as botha philosopher of the body and a strange materialist thatmotivates my attention to his analysis of light, the night, and theinsomniac's struggle with wakefulness. Indeed, it is via a critiqueof light in Existence and Existents that Levinas builds ametaphysical theory of the subject which, I contend, is basicallymaterialist. This materialism is given explicit expression in thediscourse on the night and it is concretized in the phenomenologyof insomnia.

Metaphorics of Light

The metaphor of light plays a significant role in every period ofphilosophy's history, a role which is not reducible to an innocentliterary trope. As Hans Blumenberg notes, "already in Plato ... themetaphorics of light already has a metaphysics of light implicit init." The philosophical function of the light metaphor isevidenced by glancing at the work of Plato, Descartes, andHeidegger, each of whom informs Levinas's ethics in a fundamentalway. In his descriptions of the transcendent goodness ofthe Other, Levinas draws on Plato's image of the sun as thatwhich illuminates beings and thus enables vision andknowledge. The light which emanates from the sun, which in onesense represents the Good beyond being, figures as the divinesource of what exists. To quote Levinas: "Light, whether itemanates from the sensible or from the intelligible sun, is, sincePlato, said to be the condition for all beings" (EE 40). InDescartes, from whom Levinas borrows the idea of infinity inorder to characterize once again the transcendence of the Other,it is the natural light of reason, the lumen naturale, that intuitswhat is beyond our doubt and as such designated certainknowledge. The natural light of reason, which is "[withdrawnfrom] all my senses" and all "images of corporeal things," isessential to rational self-reflection and the discovery of the egocogito. Finally, the image of light figures into Heidegger's notionof truth. Dasein serves as the Lichtung, or "lighted clearing,"wherein being is disclosed or uncovered. Levinas's critique oflight seizes upon this notion of disclosure and its ubiquity inphilosophical and phenomenological rhetoric.

On Levinas's account the "essential event" of the world is"intention and light" (EE 28-29). This is as the phenomenologistsees it. By "the world," Levinas here means Heidegger's worldwhere beings are first and foremost an array of equipment to begrasped, manipulated, and employed as tools toward determinatehuman ends: "A being is what is thought about, seen,acted on, willed, felt—an object. Consequently, existence in theworld always has a center; it is never anonymous" (EE 29). As hewrites this, Levinas is preparing a decisive criticism of theluminosity of the subject-object correlation endemic to phenomenology(and Heideggerian ontology), which in a sense includesPlato and Kant. Remarking on how the sun's rays bind togetherseer and seen, and thus constitute vision, Plato holds that "whenthe eyes are no longer turned upon objects upon whose colorsthe light of day falls but that of the dim luminaries of night, theiredge is blunted and they appear almost blind ..." The problemwith this perspective is that it restricts the realm of sense to whatappears and has form; it disallows for meanings or significationsthat resist the ordering gaze of the ego. "What does not enter intothe forms is banished from the world," Levinas says (EE 31).This is because, for intentional consciousness, "sense is that bywhich what is exterior is already adjusted to and refers to whatis interior" (EE 40). Its "light is that through which something isother than myself, but already as if it came from me."

Ontology of the Night

The luminous view of the world entails, for Levinas, a reductionof the otherness of the given as well as a reduction of thechallenge to theoretical consciousness that alterity poses: itassumes that everything that exists is graspable by the intellectand able to be encompassed by a totalizing vision. But it fails tonotice that the intellect only grasps that which has "objective"sense, that is, has a form imposed on it: "Form is that by which abeing is turned toward the sun, that by which it has a face,through which it gives itself, by which it comes forward" (EE 31).Consequently, and as Derrida will point out in "Violence andMetaphysics," by maintaining a primacy of intentionality andthe subject-object correlation, the phenomenological conceptionof sense maintains an implicit violence which manifests in itsreduction of the Other. In the phenomenological and ontologicaltraditions, Derrida argues,

there is a soliloquy of reason and a solitude of light. Incapableof respecting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenologyand ontology would be philosophies of violence.Through them, the entire philosophical tradition, in itsmeaning and at bottom, would make common cause withoppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. Theancient clandestine friendship between light and power, theancient complicity between theoretical objectivity andtechnico-political possession.

Whether the stakes are as dire as this passage suggests (andLevinas seems to see them as such), the seriousness of itsportrayal fuels the urgency of Levinas's ethical project. His ethicsnecessitates a renunciation of light and a defense of thosemeanings which exceed the limits of theoretical...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 178279056X
• ISBN 13: 9781782790563
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 164
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar