Finden Sie Top-Angebote für Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference (2016, Gebundene Ausgabe) bei eBay. Indeed, Levinas continues, although Heidegger makes the relation with the other into a fundamental aspect of human life, he does not discuss intersubjectivity in much detail and offers a very unsatisfactory account of it to the extent that he does. ), Horizons of authenticity in phenomenology, existentialism, and moral psychology. He “[absolves] himself from […] all resemblance” (Levinas 1974/1981: 86) and is “uprooted, without a country” (Levinas 1974/1981: 91). An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). While Heidegger maintains that, though difficult, it is in and through Dasein’s situatedness that authenticity can be found, Levinas insists that it is only by looking beyond time and place that self and other can be seen for what they truly are. Bernasconi, R. (2005). According to Levinas, election constitutes both “a privilege and a subordination, because it does not place [the child] among the other chosen ones, but rather in face of them, to serve them” (1961/1969: 279). Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the question of anti-Semitism. Yet Heidegger goes on to explain that Fürsorge comes in several forms, one of which he explicitly describes as authentic. He does not explain this genuine manifestation of being-with in further detail, but the second division of Being and Time makes clear, as I underscored in the introduction, that oblivious Mitsein becomes truly authentic in the form of a historically informed community. In other words, a key notion of Levinas’s mature philosophy—the face-to-face relation with the other—can be understood in terms of its difference from and opposition to Heideggerian being-with. Levinas and the political. To start with the short essay “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,” which was published in the same year as Totality and Infinity and in which Levinas in no uncertain terms draws a connection between violence and Mitsein again. Derrida, J. This is provocatively summarized in a remark he made in a 1983 interview: “In Heidegger […] Mit is always being next to… It is not in the first instance the face, it is zusammensein, perhaps zusammen-marschieren” (1983/1998: 116). Zooming in on this aspect of Heidegger’s account, Levinas gives a highly individualistic interpretation of Heideggerian authenticity, and thereby of Dasein proper. See Cohen, explaining that the Letter on Humanism makes man into the “mouthpiece of being” (2006: xx), and contrasting Levinas’s Humanism of the Other with what should accordingly be called Heidegger’s “anti-humanism” (2006: xxi). ‘Dying for…’. To be unable to shirk: this is the I” (1961/1969: 245). Heidegger’s thought informed the central problem that preoccupied Levinas during these years, namely, the rise of Nazism, Hitlerism, and the prospect of a radical collapse of civilization into barbarism and evil. Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and poetry. A person may not want to be reduced to her membership in a particular community, as Levinas amply acknowledges, but this does not mean that the only alternative is a complete disavowal of one’s situatedness. A. Like the self, the other is not to be understood in terms of his role in a larger historical development or his part in a particular social structure. This can already be seen from the 1934 essay “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” in which Heidegger is not mentioned explicitly but during the writing of which he was surely on Levinas’s mind, as a later prefatory note to the article makes clear.Footnote 5. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Levinas, E. (1987/1998). (2001). Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read Between Levinas and Heidegger. Volume IV: Beyond Levinas (pp. See also Critchley (2004: 174, 175) (though unlike Critchley, I do not think that these problematic aspects of Levinas’s work are primarily a matter of “the passage from ethics to politics” (2004: 173); they are already at work in his decontextualized notion of the ethical relation itself). Yet if Hitlerism’s appeal can be explained in terms of its embodied account of human existence, this does not concern the body in a narrow sense of the word, as Levinas’s analysis makes clear. Thomson, I. Sprache: Englisch. This account however becomes increasingly problematic as Heidegger claims that Mitsein comes in two forms. Emmanuel Levinas (1992): Schwierige Freiheit, Frankfurt /M. This particular portrayal of the difference between Heideggerian and Levinasian selfhood should however be said to result from a lax or partial reading of Being and Time, for Heidegger does not hold that there is only inauthentic Mitsein and that authenticity thus necessitates a severing of the social bond.Footnote 18 I already touched upon this in my introduction, but “‘Dying for…’” makes a somewhat more detailed discussion of Heidegger on Eigenlichtkeit necessary. This not only does away with individuality but also undermines the possibility of human sociality. “Miteinandersein, too,” Levinas claims, “is a collectivity around something common” (1947/1987: 93). Unsurprisingly, therefore, Levinas not only distances himself from Heidegger’s preoccupation with being, but also from the latter’s notion of being-with. See Guignon (1984: 333–337), explaining that one’s community not only offers the only means for becoming authentic, but that authenticity accordingly is a collective task. (2013). As important as it accordingly is to have a renewed look at Heidegger’s own writings, it is also an interesting time to revisit the critics who, long before the publication of the Black Notebooks, identified fundamental problems in the Heideggerian system and dedicated much of their own work to the prevention of these. Heidegger’s terms for these phenomena would be Machenschaft and Planetarismus: see, e.g., Heidegger (1939-1941/2014: 52f., 125, 260f., 264–266) (note the resemblance with the analysis of das Man); see also Malpas (2016: 15f.). Political Theory, Yet as I will conclude, this in fact offers a valuable lesson, not just for the present-day reception of Heidegger, but also for thinking about community and communities today. By reflecting on the deeper meaning of fecundity and fraternity,Footnote 15 he tries to explain the subject’s relation to the others around and beyond him without falling back on traditional models of either subjectivity or sociality (Bergo 1999: 122–131).Footnote 16. Moreover, even though the “quasi-dialectical” (Bergo 1999: 27–32) notion of fecundity disappears from Otherwise than Being, it retains the concept of fraternity and also contains a long discussion on the third. In this article I argue that Levinas can be read as a critic, not just of Heideggerian being, but also of being-with. Radloff, B. It afforded Levinas a way of understanding these historical events as deep philosophical problems rather than cognitive or historical aberrations. Plotinus: Towards an Ontology of Likeness (On the One and Nous). Having argued that Levinasian subjectivity, alterity and sociality can all be explained in terms of his aversion to Mitsein, I will now discuss another, seemingly opposing argument he makes against Heidegger. Mitsein only becomes authentic, as Heidegger notoriously contends in § 74 of Being and Time, when the human beings who find themselves in the same socio-historical situation resolutely take up their specific heritage and actively give shape to their proper place in history. In J. E. Drabinski & E. S. Nelson (Eds. In this paper, Levinas explains his difficult relationship with Heidegger —torn as he remains “between youthful admiration” and “the irreversible abomination” (1987/1998: 207) of Heidegger’s affiliation with Nazism—as a conflict between an account of man according to which he only cares for himself, and an account according to which man is rather there for the other. As in his earlier work, Levinas argues that fraternity does not unite men through similarity or identity (Carlson 1998: 42f., 64): “All the others that obsess me in the other do not affect me […] by resemblance or common nature” (Levinas 1974/1981: 159) but by their utter vulnerability. It afforded Levinas a way of understanding these historical events as deep philosophical problems rather than cognitive or historical aberrations. Cohen, R. A. The question however is whether such abstractness can capture the understanding that self and other have of their own true selves (assuming that this is not necessarily less insightful than the understanding that the philosopher has of their proper identities, as Heidegger explicitly claims but Levinas can perhaps also be said to presuppose). Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995) zählt zu den bedeutendsten Denkern des 20. In Collected philosophical papers (A. Lingis, Trans.) Fecundity and fraternity absorb neither self nor other(s), and to the extent that it binds them, this is not by similarity or identity but by an excess of responsibility that leaves their separation intact. This is for instance the strategy followed by Nancy, who maintains that Heidegger never properly thought through his notion of Mitsein (see Nancy 2008) and himself offers an account of coexistence (in Nancy 2000, among others) according to which community is not a common being but the very fact of our being-together. See also, e.g., Levinas (1961/1969: 46, 55, 80). 28(5), 578–604. Kostenlose Lieferung für viele Artikel! As Levinas even claims in the 1990 preface, “the possibility of elemental evil […] is inscribed within the ontology of […] a being, to use the Heideggerian expression, ‘dem es in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht’” (1934/1990: 63).Footnote 7 It is the tragic logic, to put it in terms of Mitsein, of a being only concerned with itself and its kin, at the expense of the being of others. (2005). Levinas, E. (1934/1990). In 1972, so two years before the publication of Otherwise than Being, Levinas expresses similar ideas in an article titled “Meaning and Sense”. 75–107). And as is the case with the initial other, I cannot be deaf to their calls either. Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Levinas, E. (1983/1998). Levinas however focuses on one particular element that I did not mention: Heidegger argues that a proper relation to one’s ownmost death is crucial when it comes to turning Uneigentlichkeit around. - 51.158.177.122. 5, 21–49. (Ed.). Even if Heidegger does not explain in any detail how Dasein is able to come into its own, singular self in the process of co-historizing, and even if it is highly doubtful whether the notion of Volk can ever do justice to the singularity of all selves and others, this does not imply that the very idea of human situatedness should be categorically dismissed. Totality and infinity. For as soon as the ego has gathered in his home, a stranger may knock on his door to “contest” (Levinas 1961/1969: 171) his possessions. This suggest, as I will argue in more detail in the final section, that not all human beings are equally free from history and community for Levinas. In the Hitlerism essay, Levinas argues that National Socialism appeals to the “German soul” (1934/1990: 64) because it offers an antidote to an idea that has long dominated Western thought: from Christianity up until liberalism, man has been presented as possessing an unconditional freedom, “infinite with regard to any attachment and through which no attachment is ultimately definitive” (1934/1990: 65). 30(1), 76–87. Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941). ), Levinas describes living among the elements as a matter of purposeless “enjoyment” (1961/1969: 110). Levinas more precisely argues that “[t]he woman”—“whose presence is discreetly an absence”—“is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation” (1961/1969: 155). Both however question whether Heidegger should not be given a little more credit – but neither of them refers to, e.g., his statements about the Volk. In Entre nous: On thinking-of-the-other (M. B. Smith & B. Harshav, Trans.) It afforded Levinas a way of understanding these historical events as deep philosophical problems rather than cognitive or historical aberrations. Humans are not only fecund but also engendered beings, he points out, and this makes them simultaneously one of a kind and irrevocably bound to their fellow men. Without being reducible to a commentary on Being and Time, Totality and Infinity contests, among other things, the primacy Heidegger accords to ontology and his explanation of truth as disclosure. In line with the texts I already examined, moreover, Levinas’s first main work challenges Heidegger’s account of sociality in terms of being-with (Peperzak 1993: 144, 166, 170, 208).Footnote 9 According to Heidegger, Levinas observes, intersubjectivity concerns “a we prior to the I and the other” (1961/1969: 68).Footnote 10 This means that while he can be praised for showing that the social relation is not a purely cognitive matter, Heidegger ultimately fares no better than the rest of Western thought. On what ground, after all, are this place and these amenities mine rather than another’s? Drabinski, J. E., & Nelson, E. S. (2014). The Levinasian other does not belong to a segment of humanity different from mine; he does not belong to any group or community, and that is what truly makes him other (Visker 2003: 278f. Vondiesen Prämissen ausgehend, grenzt Lévinas seine Optik vonder der Heideggerschen und Husserlschen Phänomenologie ab. See also Bernasconi on the “Western triumphalism” (2005: 25) that still informs Levinas’s thinking. See, e.g., McMullin (2013: 141–23) for a more detailed discussion of solicitude. It is only in the responsibility for another person that I truly come into my own. Initially one of Heidegger’s most devoted followers, Levinas became very critical of Heideggerian philosophy, and the latter’s flirtations with Nazism seem to have played a pivotal role in this development (Peperzak 1993: 4; Moyn 1998: 26–29). N2 - This chapter offers a comprehensive account of Levinas’s relation to Heidegger’s thought during the formative years of his philosophical development through to Totality and Infinity (1961). The fact that Levinas discusses fecundity solely in masculine terms also raises the question whether Totality and Infinity takes the female self and other to be equally free from history and community (see my earlier note). Heidegger, M. (1938-1939/2014). In E. T. Long (Ed. 5–30). The third party. Levinas uses the final paragraphs of “‘Dying for…’” to suggest a different perspective on death, sociality and their interrelation. ), Difficult justice: Commentaries on Levinas and politics (pp. Dasein’s “historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny” (1927/1962: 436), Heidegger claims. Turning arbitrary inhabitation into something good, he “founds […] and justifies” (Levinas 1961/1969: 197) the life of the subject. That Levinas describes the other as a stranger “coming from another shore” (1961/1969: 171) should therefore not be misunderstood: it does not mean that he differs from me in terms of ethnicity or nationality, say. “This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people,” and it is participation in this communal process that “goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein” (Heidegger 1927/1962: 436). Levinas Studies, Duff, A. S. (2015). Moyn, S. (1998). Hence, Totality and Infinity ends by offering an account of multipersonal relations that is, like the accounts of subjectivity and alterity given earlier in the book, radically different from Heideggerian Mitsein. Emmanuel Levinas (født 12. januar 1906 i Kovno, Litauen (dav. “One can be to him what Malebranche or Spinoza had been to Descartes. I will discuss this in more detail in the final section. Taking issue with Heidegger’s instrumental account of the world in terms of ready-to-hand (Peperzak 1993: 149f., 155f. One striking feature of Levinas’s account is that he starts by explaining the self purely in terms of its material surroundings, not in terms of its social milieu (Fagenblat 2002: 584, 589; Dastur 2014: 135f. Can it not add insult to injury to state that such characteristics should be disregarded?Footnote 23 Should it at the very least not be up to people themselves whether they want to break from their socio-historical background, or from which aspects of this background they want to distance themselves? History and Memory, The recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks have reignited the debate about the relationship between his philosophy and politics. Sophia, That is to say, Levinas continues, enjoyment does come with some concerns. (Buch (gebunden)) - bei eBook.de Stripping human beings of all socio-historical characteristics seems neither desirable nor possible—even Levinas’s attempt to use his own situatedness against itself only ends up underscoring his being a European Jew instead of, e.g., a non-Western polytheist, thereby also indicating that his plea for breaking with history and community does not necessarily mean the same for people from all possible backgrounds.Footnote 26, Hence, while Levinas already at an early stage identified a key notion behind Heidegger’s problematic politics and devoted much of his work to actively challenging a division of the human world into different social units, his perspective runs into problems too. Originary inauthenticity: On Heidegger’s Sein Und Zeit. The early Levinas’s reply to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Fecundity and fraternity, by contrast, do “not join together the fragments of a broken totality” (Levinas 1961/1969: 301) but result in an “untotaled multiplicity” (Levinas 1961/1969: 294); a true, irreducible plurality (Critchley 2015: 102–104). Levinas and Heidegger: Ethics or ontology? (2016). Regardless of what Levinas suggests, the difference between Being and Time and “‘Dying for…’” is accordingly not so much that of a rejection versus a recovery of being-with, as it is a disagreement—in line with my account of the difference between Heidegger and Levinas more generally—over what constitutes the social relation properly understood; over what constitutes, to put it in Heideggerian terms, authentic Mitsein. In contrast to the main argument in the foregoing sections, then, “‘Dying for…’” suggests that Levinas wants to rescue rather than reject being-with. For under the reign of technology, the world is made into a place without borders and without distinctions, hence without a proper people able to hear that being is beckoning for a new beginning. Instead of standing in the service of its selfish genes, therefore, fecundity allows the self to renew its ownmost but never-ending obligation to the rest of mankind. This means that Gagarin offers a counterexample to the claim that human beings are always already socially and locally situated and owe their very identity to this (Caygill 2005: 91f.). Arguing that this rests on a misreading of Being and Time, I will use this opportunity to raise questions about Levinas’s interpretation of Heidegger and about his alternative explanation of coexistence. Hum Stud 40, 381–400 (2017). In the terms of Being and Time, Dasein is always already Mitsein: from the outset, the human being finds itself among others in an inherently social world. On thinking-of-the-other (M. B. Smith & B. Harshav, Trans.) As Levinas explains in the preface, he will offer a rethinking of time that will also require a rethinking of intersubjectivity, because it requires a self outside of community yet in relation with a radically other. To be sure, this is because Judaism, on his view, offers an “abstract universalism” that allows us to move beyond “family, tribe and nation” (Levinas 1961/1990: 234). (1994/2005). Levinas explicitly frames several of his mature philosophical works as attempts to respond to Heidegger's philosophy in light of its ethical failings. It stands in a long tradition that conceives of the social relation on the model of fusion. Compare Sikka (2001: 114f. The other cannot be qualified or categorized but is “refractory to every […] classification” (Levinas 1961/1969: 73). Critical Inquiry, 17(1), 62–71. For as Levinas points out: “The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other” (1961/1969: 213).Footnote 14 As soon as I face responsibility for the destitute stranger, I can see the reflection of countless other others that are in equal need of my dedication. Russiske Kejserrige), død 25. december 1995 i Paris, Frankrig) var en fransk filosof og Talmud-tolker.. Levinas, der var af en jødisk familie, emigrerede allerede i 1923 til Frankrig, hvor han blev statsborger i 1930.Han studerede først i Strasbourg og fra 1928 i Freiburg, hvor han blev undervist af bl.a. (1998). “Decolonization,” Drabinski explains, “means taking […] historical experience seriously and allowing it a disturbing, interruptive register” (2011: 44); this accordingly means to offer “[a] Levinasian thinking thought otherwise” (2011: 44). Book. His son is the composer Michaël Levinas, and his son-in-law is the French mathematician Georges Hansel. 133–158). While someone can completely take over the other’s task of facing his finite existence, Heidegger states that “there is also the possibility of a kind of solicitude which does not […] take away his ‘care’ but rather [gives] it back to him authentically as such for the first time” (1927/1962: 158f. Even after its death, the Levinasian subject does not completely disappear into larger socio-historical structures but lives on as “historical without fate” (1961/1969: 278). In J. E. Drabinski & E. S. Nelson (Eds. It allows us “to perceive men outside the situation in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its nudity” (Levinas 1961/1990: 233), in Levinas’s words. It always concerns a specific socio-historical community that has to be distinguished from other such communities, and apparently also has to be defended against them when its distinctive destiny is under threat (Heidegger 1938-1939/2014: 191f. Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (Book) › Research › peer-review. He bases this on Heidegger’s claim that everyday Dasein, as I also explained in my introduction, is first and foremost inauthentic, precisely because it finds itself absorbed by the others around it. 32(2), 172–185. Critchley, S. (2015). In Levinas’s view, put differently, there can be no subjectivity or individuality as long as the subject is seen as part of a larger socio-historical unity. non-occidental—“cultures” (1972/1987: 84); he accordingly regrets that contemporary phenomenology feels the need to “show the very excellence of Western culture to be culturally and historically conditioned” (1972/1987: 101).Footnote 25, In other words, Levinas’s all too hasty reading of Being and Time raises the question whether his anti-Mitsein account is not overly hasty as well, for it is not just in “‘Dying for…’” that he disregards Heidegger’s explicit denial that authentic being-with is impersonal and faceless. In: Ciräs (25/1), 132ff. ; 1939-1941/2014: 243): as a people strictly speaking not worthy of that name because their diasporic existence personifies all that is wrong with the modern age. 23(6), 29–49. In the philosophy of Hitlerism, he points out, the body functions as a symbol for man’s bonds or chains more generally: it “serves as an enigmatic vehicle” for “[t]he mysterious urgings of the blood, the appeals of heredity and the past” (1934/1990: 69). And one moreover forgets that declaring all cultures equal is to deprive oneself of the means to pass judgment on a particular society, even in the face of the most horrendous atrocities committed by it: “Morality does not belong to culture: it enables one to judge it” (Levinas 1972/1987: 100). Though Levinas does not seem to be the only one who does not connect division I’s account of authenticity with division II’s analysis of (co-)historicality. In Peperzak (2000) he nonetheless argues that the face to face is simultaneous with the belonging to a larger community (2000: 60), which I do not take to be in line with Levinas’s resistance to being-with. At the same time, however, inhabitation precisely makes such a confrontation possible. Feminist interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. Time and the shared world: Heidegger on social relations. Born into a Jewish family in Lithuania in 1906, Levinas left in 1917 for the Ukraine, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. 55–64). Correspondence to London: Routledge. Levinas: Thinking least about death—contra Heidegger. Hier kam er in Kontakt mit Charles Blondel, Maurice Halbwachs, Maurice Pradines, Henri Carteron und Maurice Blanchot, mit dem Levinas eine lebenslange Freundschaft verband. Drabinski, J. E. (2001). Levinas on the intersection of the ethical and the political. Aus dem Französischen von Frank Miething. In this article I argue that Levinas can be read as a critic, not just of Heideggerian being, but also of being-with. Paradoxically, therefore, the “with” fails to establish a proper relation with the other as other. In § 26 of Being and Time—so before claiming in § 27 that everyday being-with is guided by das Man—Heidegger proposes to use the term Fürsorge or solicitude for our dealings with other beings of the human kind, as Levinas also mentions. Levinas between ethics and politics: For the beauty that adorns the earth. In these passages, Totality and Infinity—not unlike Time and the Other—thus falls back on traditional stereotypes about the female other. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Writing in 2007, however, Radloff can still claim that “Heidegger, by all evidence, is philosophically opposed to anti-Semitism” (2007: 171). Center for Contemporary European Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, Postbus 9103, 6500 HD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, You can also search for this author in author = "Fagenblat, {Michael Charles}". Like his predecessors, he prefers the whole over its parts and larger processes over concrete particularity, thus rendering him unable to properly think both self, other and the relation between them—the main topics of Totality and Infinity. Is ethics fundamental? ; 1939-1941/2014: 44–46, 52f., 133, 146f. Heidegger concludes from this that the only way out of Uneigentlichkeit is to cut all ties with one’s fellow men, Levinas claims. Time and the other (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Totality and Infinity thus radically rethinks human sociality—or being-with—in no less than two ways.