From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: levinas
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 07:20:12 -0600


Steve,

Since you mention Simon Critchley, here is another quote from him:

"I would want to claim, with Blanchot, that what opens up in the
relation to the alterity of death, of my dying, and the other's dying,
is not the transcendence of the Good beyond Being or the trace of God,
but the neutral alterity of the il y a, the primal scene of emptiness,
absence, and disaster, what I am tempted to call, rather awkwardly,
atheist transcendence."

Certainly, you would agree it remains an open question whether or not a
radical ethics and politics need necessarily be Hegelian and dialectic.
The kind of excess or remainder to which Critchley points is also a
factor in many so-called post-structuralist critiques such as those of
Lyotard or Zizek.  

The question of the alterity of the animal or nonhuman does not seem
impossible to me either, but clearly Levinas does not develop this and I
don't have the energy either this morning. 

eric