While Levinas famously claims that ethics precedes ontology and emanates from the concrete experience of the other's face, it is often forgotten that Deleuze also discusses the face in numerous writings. The purpose of this paper is to briefly outline Levinas's arguments regarding the constitution of the face to chart its ethical importance, before engaging with Deleuze's critique of Levinas's position. I show that, by distinguishing between two systems of signification – the head-body system and the face system – Deleuze (...) agrees with Levinas that the face is an important signifier delineating the other, but destructs the notion of face to show that it: is more complex and multi-dimensional than Levinas realizes; emanates from a specific semiotic relationship; and emanates from specific socio-historical circumstances. Showing the face is a semiotic construct based in and emanating from a specific socio-historical configuration allows Deleuze not only to conclude that the face is related to politics not ethics as Levinas claims, but also to claim that it entails the inhuman in the human. This clarifies the nature of the face in Deleuze, offers a critique of Levinas's influential thinking on ethics, brings us to a discussion of the relationship between ethics and politics and reveals what Deleuze takes the political to entail. (shrink)

After considering core ‘interruptions’ of identity and justice in the post-secularist agonisms of Connolly and Levinas, I mine their views for core practical insights about the possibilities for theist-atheist respect. After considering Connolly on ‘content v. comportment’ and after exploring the virtue of mystery as part of a mystery/contestability/generosity triad, as well as Connolly’s, Levinas’, Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s levels of optimism and pessimism about theism, I end by pointing to cracks in Connolly’s path to pluralism, and I recommend that the (...) ‘open and trembling’ mood of Levinas’ phenomenology serves as an important model for the kind of generous comportment that atheists and theists need on our path to respectful agono-pluralism. (shrink)

Given present criticisms of contemporary education and leadership practices, this article investigates the ways in which the basic concepts of state freedom and bureaucracy stifle ethics and social justice in educational leadership practices through the philosophical framework of Emmanuel Levinas. By investigating Levinas’ ‘an-archy’, the definition of ethics and justice in school leadership can be reframed towards responsibility to otherness rather than individual freedom. The anarchical ethic of pure responsibility to the Other suggests that educational leaders should prioritize specific acts (...) of responsibility over general actions based on the assumptions of traditional state education. Aspects of transactional, transformational, and social justice leadership are critiqued from this perspective. (shrink)

For both Levinas and Løgstrup, the moral encounter is characterized by an asymmetrical prioritization of the other over the self. Some take Løgstrup’s account to be an improvement on Levinas’s, however, insofar as it appears to both foreswear the hyperbole of the latter’s view and ground the ethical claim in the natural conditions of human life. This paper argues, in contrast, that Løgstrup’s own account is equally hyperbolic in its characterization of the self as fundamentally evil, and that his attempt (...) to ground the ethical demand in structures of ‘life’ raises serious difficulties. I will argue that Levinas’s stronger commitment to phenomenology both rules out the problematic metaphysical claims on which Løgstrup’s ontological ethics depends and helps explain the methodological function of Levinas’s own hyperbole. Unlike Løgstrup, Levinas insists that the challenge is not eradicating the claims of the self, but rather resisting its pretention to a global normative priority. In making this case I refute the argument that Levinas, unlike Løgstrup, is committed to a ‘command’ view of morality—whereby it is the other person’s authoritative status that underwrites the moral force of the claim, not the content of the claim itself. But on Levinas’s view, ‘demand’ and ‘command’ accounts merge in his understanding of the face-to-face encounter because responding to the content of the demand—that I treat the other’s claim as reason-giving— just is to see the other person as an authority capable of making legitimate claims on me. (shrink)

By prioritizing the ethical encounter with the Other over politics, Levinas appears to relegate political concerns to a secondary status. Not only does politics appear to be less important than the face-to-face, it even appears to be morally compromised. Nevertheless, Levinas insists that politics are necessary for a moral society. This paper attempts to navigate this tension between morality and politics by exploring Levinas’s account of original peace as opposed to competing accounts of original violence in Hobbes and Derrida. This (...) original peace not only serves as a foundation of the political order, but also provides the context in which to understand Levinas’s famous account of the third. The introduction of the third party appears to problematize the self-other account and opens an aporia in the ethical relation. Far from being a necessary evil, politics instead appears as a necessary good to both remain true to the ethical imperative of the face-to-face and solve the problem introduced by the third party. It is by recognizing that the political is already implicated in the face-to-face relation that Levinas seeks to bridge the gap between peace with the Other and peace within a political society. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Levinas can be read as a critic, not just of Heideggerian being, but also of being-with. After pointing out that the publication of the Black Notebooks only makes this criticism more interesting to revisit, I first of all discuss passages from both earlier and later writings in which Levinas explicitly takes issue with Heidegger’s claim that there is no self outside of a specific socio-historical community. I then explain how these criticisms are reflected in (...) Levinas’s own account, arguing that Levinasian subjectivity and alterity are precisely defined by their not belonging to a larger unity; to the extent that they partake in a multi-personal collectivity, this does not take the form of a traditional community. In the final section, I look into a different and seemingly opposing argument Levinas makes against Heidegger: on the basis of the latter’s reflections on death, he argues that Dasein is anti-social rather than overly immersed in the socio-historical. Arguing that this rests on a misreading of Being and Time, I use this opportunity to raise questions about Levinas’s interpretation of Heidegger and his “otherwise than being-with” more generally, for Levinas’s account runs into several problems as well. Yet as I will conclude, this in fact offers a valuable insight, not just for the present-day reception of Heidegger, but also for thinking community today. It indicates that a radical break with human situatedness does not automatically fare better than a firmly enrooted account of existence. (shrink)