Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 07:59:36 -0700 From: smh-AT-artnet.net (Sean Hill) Subject: Re: Humanism, Levinas, Foucault >I've been increasingly fascinated recently by the work of Emmanuel Levinas >and the possibilities of reading him next to Foucault's work. This would >also prove fertile ground for some of the recent discussion of humanism >and antihumanism on this list. Allow me to quote again from Tony Davies' >book that I mentioned in an earlier post. This deserves more exploration, >and if anyone knows of any insightful works on Foucault and Levinas, >please mention them. This comparison of Levinas to Foucault is interesting. Although I am not familiar with Levinas' work, nor Davies' book, I am nonetheless curious about the definition of subjectivity as determined by "an irreducible 'other', the not-I that defines me for myself." In the passage below, Davies shows Levinas' similarities to structuralist accounts of subjectivity, but I am also reminded of Hegel's subject as "negatively determined". So I have a couple of questions here in regards to subjectivity: 1) is Levinas' account similar to Hegel's? 2) How does it differ from the structuralists? 3) If Foucault (in his archaeological and genealogical periods) is attempting to displace the subject as primary, through a suspicion of the givenness of conscious experience, wouldn't he also reject this notion of the subject as defined by the "not-I" as an external abstraction? sean >"The Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas has written of the possibility of >an 'humanisme de l'autre homme', a concept and practice of the human that >proceeds not -- like Descartes' self-contemplative 'I' or Kant's >transcendental subjectivity -- from a primary centered ego reaching out to >know and seize the world, but from an irreducible 'other', the not-I that >defines me for myself. Levinas retraces here the gestures of those >structural and post-humanist thinkers like Saussure, Levi-Strauss, >Foucault, and the psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan, for whom the speaking, >conscious 'I' is always provisional and secondary to the orders of >language and social meaning within which it constructs itself. But his >writing, though refreshingly free of the complacent philanthropic piety of >much contemporary humanism, retains an ethical register denied to those >for whom the human is simply an effect of structure or discourse. Humanity >is neither an essence nor an end, but a continuous and precarious process >of becoming human, a process that entails the inescapable recognition that >our humanity is on loan from others, to precisely the extent that we >acknowledge it in them." (Davies, 132) > > >Nathan
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