Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Introduction
Emmanuel Levinas is not a philosopher of love. The Lithuanian-born, French Jewish thinker gave birth to a rather substantial œuvre, writing for nearly seventy years on a variety of themes and questions. If love appears in the prose of Levinas, it is not as a topic in itself…
Tag: Levinas : For the Feminine Other
Essay Series
Levinas’s prose, intentionally poetic in style, carries the climate of almost an spiritual discussion. Levinas’s words have a certain aura, a sense of solemnity, the impression of a profundity that one would only find in sacred texts. Inherently, there is a sort of timeless beauty and depth visible from the first sight, in the texts of Levinas. But is it the charm of a benevolent father figure, or is it the persuasive argumentation of an authoritative patriarch ? . . .
Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 1
It is undeniable that Levinas tends to submit numbers of formulations, expressions or hypotheses that seem, to say the least, controversial. In Existents and Existence, Levinas states, “the other par excellence is the feminine,” a proposition that would be complemented, one year later in Time and the Other with the view that the pure “essence” of the feminine is otherness or alterity…
Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 2
The richness of Levinas’s prose allows for numerous possible interpretations. Levinas is an author who is very careful with his words. This is the consideration that has led a number of commentators to try retrieving the sources of Levinas’s more or less controversial statements on the feminine…
Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 3
The margins regularly produce some of the most pertinent voices. Mitchel Verter is a rather unknown and unrecognized scholar, who dissimulates this qualification of his on the background of his résumé, to highlight his professional activity as restaurant waiter and suicide counsellor. He has nonetheless written a series of fascinating essays on Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche and others, all available in his obscure page, hosted on a communitarian website…
Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Conclusion
If the aim of a scholarly work of quality is to present a problem in its diverse complexities, and, in some situations, to take a position or defend one of the views, it could appear, here, as judicious to use Verter’s demonstration as the last words of this discussion…