Have you reread Levinas lately?

transformations of the face in post-Holocaust fiction

Norman Ravvin

pp. 52-69

in: Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods (eds), The ethics in literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

Not unlike handsome cities razed to rubble by war, our contemporary intellectual traditions undergo repeated attack and burial. Schools of thought spread their influence to a variety of fields and then are dismissed as outmoded; prophets are uncovered then deposed; even particularly charged words — once on everyone's lips and in book-title after book-title — are condemned to a long afterlife as journalistic clichés. In the context of this seemingly unflagging embrace of abandonment and change, consider the name, the work, the face of Emmanuel Levinas. As I write, and possibly still as you read, Levinas is a kind of prophet. Through his interrogation of the Western philosophical tradition he has become the source of one of the key paradigm shifts of postmodern culture: a return to ethics, a remaking of our tradition in the direction of the other. In his words, the "being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might …. However, with the appearance of the human — and this is my entire philosophy — there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other."¹

Cited authors

Levinas Emmanuel