This article analyses various ways to articulate the ethical investigations of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas with the doctrine of the responsibility to protect. In response to genocide and mass atrocity, an imperative to understand responsibility in a broader and more forceful way entails in both cases a new and analogous revision of the related concepts of identity and sovereignty. A basic complementarity of Levinas’ ethics with the responsibility to protect is ascertained: while Levinas’ ethical investigations can indeed bring a philosophical (...) basis to the responsibility to protect, the latter can, in a limited way, be construed as practical policy implications of the former. (shrink)

The premise of this brief study is an examination of the conditions in which a decentering can occur in the Blanchotian manner of the experience of listening to music. Through an exploration of these conditions of decentering, and taking as an example the first scene of the narrative Thomas the Obscure, the text probes the very notion of music, its presuppositions and prerogatives, in order to construct subsequently the hypothesis of a music free from any polar structure, of a music (...) construed as simply a given. By thus circumscribing all music between the two poles of a music comparable, on the one hand, to a landscape or natural horizon and, on the other hand, to a language, the essay foregrounds within Blanchot’s thought the basis of a possible becoming for a music which would engage the listener not as a plane of actualization but as a porous space. (shrink)