THE OTHER’S DIFFERENCE AND ETHICS OF PLURALISM IN LEVINAS
Keywords:
LEVINAS, ETHICSAbstract
‘Integration’ – national, global, or communal – is necessitated primarily by the exigencies of ‘difference’, manifested either in hideous forms of hatred and violence, or in more subtle forms of grudging toleration and frozen interaction. It is from an awareness of difference, arising from varieties of social categories like sex, colour, race, caste, tribe, language, and religion, and the abjectly damaging consequences of personal as well as social interpretation of the significance of such differences that the goal of integration gathers urgency in a nation’s priorities and an individual’s value system.
References
Michael Purcell, Levinas and Theology, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 46.
Simon Critchley, “Introduction” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, eds. Critchley and Bernasconi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 1-6.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Seán Hand, Critical Enquiry 17, 1 (1990), 63; emphasis added
Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, 111.
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillippe Neme, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, USA: Duquesne University Press, 1985, 98-99.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Proximity of the Other,” trans. Bettina Bergo, in Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins, Stanford, USA: Stanford University Press, 2001, 211-212.
Roland Paul Blum, “Emmanuel Levinas’ Theory of Commitment,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44, 2 (1983), 147
See Wes Avram, “On the Priority of ‘Ethics’ in the Work of Levinas,” Journal of Religious Ethics 24, 2 (1996), 261-285.
Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987, 165-166.
Levinas deals specifically with the question of justice in both of his important works. See, for example, TI, 212-214 and OTB, 157-162
Michael Dillion, “Another Justice,” Political Theory 27, 2 (1999), 168.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics and Politics” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, London: Basil Blackwell, 1989, 294.
For a thoroughly political reading of Levinas’ works, see, Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political, London: Routledge, 2002.
Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass, Stanford, USA: Stanford University Press, 1999, 64.
Emmanuel Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith, London: The Athlone Press, 1994, 98
