Emmanuel Levinas. Textes relatifs à la soutenance de thèse du 6 juin 1961

Présentation Le dossier de la soutenance de thèse d’Emmanuel Levinas tel qu’il se trouve dans les archives déposées à l’IMEC contient des textes préparés à l’avance, notamment l’intervention initiale d’Emmanuel Levinas pour la présentation de son travail, mais également des réponses à partir du rapport de Gabriel Marcel reçu avant la soutenance. Il y a sans doute également des textes écrits au moment même de la soutenance. Tels qu’il..

Proximity: A Levinasian Approach to Justice for Animals

The increased use of terms associated with rights appears to have led, at the most, to only moderate changes with regard to the actual level of protection and the underlying ethical-legal status of animals. Whereas the rights discourse may have been a logical first step, there appears to be underlying issues that cannot be adequately addressed through this discourse

Video Nasty: The Moral Apocalypse in Koji Suzuki’s Ring

Although overshadowed by its filmic adaptations (Hideo Nakata, 1998 and Gore Verbinski, 2002), Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (1991) is at the heart of the international explosion of interest in Japanese horror. This article seeks to explore Suzuki’s overlooked text. Unlike the film versions, the novel is more explicitly focused on the line between self-preservation and self-sacrifice, critiquing the ease with which the former is privileged over the latter. In the novel then, the horror of Sadako’s curse raises questions about the terrors of moral obligation: the lead protagonist (Asakawa) projects the guilt he feels over his self-interested actions, envisaging them as an all-consuming apocalypse

Morally Respectful Listening and its Epistemic Consequences

What does it mean to listen to someone respectfully, that is, insofar as they are due recognition respect? This paper addresses that question and gives the following answer: it is to listen in such a way that you are open to being surprised. A specific interpretation of this openness to surprise is then defended

Governance and Susceptibility in Conflict Resolution: Possibilities Beyond Control

Governmentality analysis offers a nuanced critique of informal Western conflict resolution by arguing that recently emerged alternatives to adversarial court processes both govern subjects and help to constitute rather than challenge formal regulation. However, this analysis neglects possibilities for transforming governance from within conflict resolution that are suggested by Foucault's contention that there are no relations of power without resistances. To explore this lacuna, I theorise and explore the affective and interpersonal nature of governance in mediation through autoethnographic reflection upon mediation practice, and Levina's insights about the relatedness of selves. The paper argues that two qualitatively different mediator capacities - technical ability and susceptibility - operate in concert to effect liberal governance. Occasionally though, difficulties and failures in mediation practice bring these capacities into tension and reveal the limits of governance. By considering these limits in mediation with Aboriginal Australian people, I argue that the susceptibility of mediator selves contains prospects for mitigating and transforming the very operations of power occurring through conflict resolution. This suggests options for expanded critical thinking about power relations operating through informal processes, and for cultivating a susceptible sensibility to mitigate liberal governance and more ethically respond to difference through conflict resolution

Razglobljeno vrijeme: vrijeme Drugoga – J. M. Coetzee: Čekajući barbare (1980)

In this article we analyze the novel Waiting for the Barbarians, by the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee. We read the novel from the perspective of some ethical insights of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, associating them with the emphasized domination of the political in the novel. In this unequal relationship, however, political domination gradually cedes place to the ethical doing, the beginning of which is marked by aporia, that is, by an attempt to reconcile two irreconcilable perspectives: that of loyalty to political authority and that of individual responsibility for the other human being. When the latter takes place, the main character – the unnamed Magistrate – becomes an ethical subject. But this is not an easy process, and in order for this to happen, he must experience physical pain and risk his own life. In doing so, he undergoes the journey from a position of political power to complete disempowering. However, taking responsibility for the other is a much more complex and precarious process than Levinas would have it. As the Magistrate finds out from his own experience, physical suffering and the recognition of immediate death deprive the human being from the possibility of apprehending the world because the body is completely focused on the pain it suffers. Bodily integrity is a precondition of any moral concepts, and identification with the other through pain therefore rarely happens at the subject’s own will and much more often is a result of circumstances. In this particular novel, those circumstances are defined and imposed by politics