<p>The aim of this study is to examine if Kenneth, a character in the novel Nyår by Stig Larsson, takes his ethical responsibility for one of the characters that appears in one section of the book, Ann. Nyår has often been related to morality. This study shows that Levinas philosophy of ethics is a supplement to the discussion of morality. According to Levinas, a person that acts in a non-moral way still can act in a righteous ethical way. With this starting point, it is possible to be close to the text and to bring out new perspectives on the novel. Kenneth is a nihilist, but has got the possibility to take his ethical responsibility for Ann. The ethical responsibility for another person, according to Levinas, always comes first. Kenneth, like everybody else, is obligated to this responsibility.</p>

The aim of this study is to examine if Kenneth, a character in the novel Nyår by Stig Larsson, takes his ethical responsibility for one of the characters that appears in one section of the book, Ann. Nyår has often been related to morality. This study shows that Levinas philosophy of ethics is a supplement to the discussion of morality. According to Levinas, a person that acts in a non-moral way still can act in a righteous ethical way. With this starting point, it is possible to be close to the text and to bring out new perspectives on the novel. Kenneth is a nihilist, but has got the possibility to take his ethical responsibility for Ann. The ethical responsibility for another person, according to Levinas, always comes first. Kenneth, like everybody else, is obligated to this responsibility.

A partir de un estudio de la teoría levinasiana de la metáfora, se formula en este artículo la noción de quiasmo metafórico con el objetivo de articular, en un espacio de exposición semántica dinámica, un movimiento de más allá (au-delà) —desplazamiento hacia otros significados— y una direcciónde más acá (en-deçà) —conservación de los rasgos sensoriales, imaginativos y afectivos asociados a las palabras. Esta herramienta filológica conduce a la siguiente tesis: la exposición ética a la vulnerabilidad del rostro surge metafóricamente en las huellas sensibles e histórico-culturales del extranjero, la viuda, el huérfano y el judío. La simultaneidad de lo Dicho estético(atención al detalle de estilo) y del Decir ético (respuesta al llamado del Otro) da lugar a una fenomenología de la vulnerabilidad social: las huellas de los rostros de los pobres convocan a compartir el pan y la palabra a partir de la manera como su fragilidad concreta habita y cuestiona los relatos abiertos de la literatura y las imágenes inacabadas del arte.Palabras clave: metáfora – ética y estética – fenomenología de la vulnerabilidad – Emmanuel Levinas AbstractIn this article, Emmanuel Levinas’ theory of metaphor derives into the notion of “metaphorical chiasm”. This idea articulates, in a semantically dynamical manner, a double-way movement: one that goes “beyond”(au-delà) —the displacement to other meanings— and another that stays “here” (en-deça) —the retention of the sensuous, imaginative and affectivetraits of words. This philological tool is functional to the following thesis: the ethical exposition to the other’s vulnerability (and, specifically, to theother’s face) expresses itself metaphorically in the sensuous, the historical and the cultural traces of the stranger, the widow, the orphan and the Jew. The simultaneity of the esthetical “Said” (the attention to stylistic detail) and the ethical “Saying” (the attention to the other’s calling) gives way to a Phenomenology of social vulnerability: the traces of the faces of the poor call for the sharing of bread and word that derives from the way in which their concrete frailty hosts and questions the open narratives of Literature and the unfinished images of Art.Keywords: metaphor – ethics and aesthetics – Phenomenology of vulnerability– Emmanuel Levinas.

This monograph addresses the problem of Emmanuel Levinas’ hyperbole in his work Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. In this text, he claims to provide a phenomenological description of the encounter the Other, yet his descriptions are deliberately hyperbolic and therefore do not seem to actually be descriptive at all. To address this problem, I propose that we can understand his hyperbole as descriptive if we understand that the subject’s encounter with the Other is a deconstructive experience. Deconstruction, which consists of both the faithful reading of a situation and the determinate destabilization of that reading, aligns with Levinas’ claim that the Other overthrows consciousness, but further explains why such an overthrow is only rarely felt in ordinary experience. Understanding the hyperbole as descriptively accurate while rarely felt will then offer a positive obligation for the subject in respect of being responsible for the Other. Cette monographie aborde le problème de l’hyperbole de Emmanuel Levinas dans son oeuvre, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Dans ce texte, il prétend fournir une description phénoménologique de la rencontre de l’Autrui, pourtant ses descriptions sont délibérément hyperboliques et ne semblent donc pas du tout être descriptives du tout. Pour aborder ce problème, je propose que nous puissions comprendre son hyperbole comme descriptive si nous comprenons que la rencontre du sujet avec l’Autrui est une expérience déconstructive. La déconstruction, qui comprend à la fois la lecture fidèle d’une situation et la déstabilisation déterminée de cette lecture, s’accorde avec l’affirmation de Levinas que l’Autrui renverse la conscience, mais explique en outre pourquoi un tel renversement n’est que rarement ressenti dans l’expérience ordinaire. Comprendre l’hyperbole comme descriptive précise alors que rarement ressenti offrira alors une obligation positive pour le sujet en ce qui concerne la responsabilité pour-l’Autrui.

Rares sont les références explicites à Marx ou au communisme sous la plume de Levinas, du moins dans ses œuvres principales. Étonnamment rares, si l’on considère leur contexte de rédaction. Les sciences humaines de la seconde moitié du XXème siècle sont occupées par la discussion du paradigme marxiste. Levinas subit de plein fouet les vicissitudes de l’histoire. A Kharkov, il assiste à la révolution russe de 1917. La catastrophe de la Shoah, dans laquelle disparait une grande partie de sa famille, marque à jamais sa mémoire. Toute sa démarche philosophique est orientée par la nécessité d’une nouvelle pensée de la communauté humaine assumant les leçons du XXème siècle. A rebours des lectures qui relèguent la question politique au rang de dimension subsidiaire dans l’œuvre levinassienne, nous faisons alors l’hypothèse de sa centralité. Ce sont les enjeux collectifs qui accusent l’insuffisance et imposent la reconsidération de l’approche humaniste du sujet et de l’éthique menée par Levinas. De ce point de vue, le projet de justice et d’universalisme porté par la tradition socialiste, notamment par Marx, constitue bien pour sa réflexion un objet central. A la fois sources d’inspiration, et révélatrices des limites d’une pensée strictement politique de la communauté, qui prétend faire l’économie de la transcendance, les propositions de Marx travaillent en sous-main les conceptions levinassiennes de l’individu, du pluralisme, de la justice ou encore de l’État. Nous avons voulu reconstituer ce dialogue implicite de Levinas avec Marx. Explorant la portée sociale et politique des motifs levinassiens, il s’avère que ces derniers recèlent une fécondité inattendue. La considération de l’ « anarchie du Bien », de la « patience » et de ce que Levinas nomme l’ « État libéral » permettent d’aborder de manière originale les questions de la justice, de la lutte sociale et des institutions politiques, faisant émerger des propositions ignorées tant par la tradition libérale que par celle du socialisme, dans ses versions marxienne et anarchiste. / Explicit references to Marx or to communism are rare in Levinas’ writing, especially in his major works. This is astonishing, considering the context in which he was writing. In the second half of the 20th century, human sciences were particularly influenced by the debate of Marxist paradigms. Levinas was truly impacted by the context of his era. He was a witness of the Russian revolution at Kharkov in 1917. Many members of his family were victims of the Shoah. This tragedy profoundly impacted him. His philosophical approach is lead by the necessity of re-thinking the « human community », whilst bearing in mind the lessons that the 20th century has left behind. Several critics have considered Levinas’ work to be “apolitical”, or have at least argued that the political undertones of his work are to be taken in consideration as a secondary factor. This thesis has, in contrary, focused upon and sustained the centrality of Levinas’ politically motivated thought. Communal and societal dilemmas are at the heart of Levinas’ ethical approach. The traditional socialist stance towards justice and universalism, in the line of Marx, constitutes a central focus of his reflexion. The suggestions made by Marx underpin Levinas’ conceptions of the individual, of pluralism, of justice and of the State. On one hand, they are a source of inspiration for Levinas, on the other, a source of critic. The thesis has aimed to reconstitute the intellectual dialogue that Levinas carried out with Marx between the lines. Whilst exploring the social and political leitmotivs of Levinas’ thought, the interminglement with Marx has been illuminating and innovative. It has enabled an original approach to questions revolving around justice, social struggle and political institutions. Considering the levinassian “Anarchy of Good”, the “Patience” and what Levinas calls the “Liberal state”, previously ignored positions emerge, which have been left on the side by the liberal tradition and by socialist thoughts both in Marxian and anarchist terms.

This study investigates how the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas might shape practice in music education. In a climate of accountability and performativity within wider educational policy-making, the drive for ever-increasing efficiency has overtaken notions of professional judgement and ethical practice. This study opens by introducing current strands of international meta-policy priorities in education, and explores moves to redress the emphasis on standardisation and accountability through the rediscovery of notions of responsibility in the work of Biesta drawing on Bauman (1993), who in turn finds a way forwards in Levinas’ ‘ethics as first philosophy’. Emmanuel Levinas is introduced as a major thinker of the twentieth century whose influence is increasing throughout social science disciplines and who, writing firstly as a teacher, provides valuable philosophical tools with which to investigate current practices in education. Over the past three decades competing paradigms for music education have tended to polarise rather than ground thinking in music education research. More recent notions of music-making as ethical encounter (Bowman, 2000) and as the practice of hospitality (Higgins, 2007) have taken forwards Small’s relationship-oriented conceptualisation of ‘musicking’ (1998), and these provide the starting point for this study’s search for an ethical underpinning for music education. Levinas’ first major work (1969) provides two key strands of thought – the polarities of totality and infinity, and the exhortation to ‘look into the face of the Other’. These tools open up explorations of how pupils encounter difference, the unfamiliar, and of how narrow conceptions of learning in the music classroom may be understood as an ethical problem. At the heart of this study is the report of ethnographically-informed fieldwork undertaken in a Scottish secondary school, following a group of 13-year-olds through an academic year of class music lessons. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews were methods employed alongside participant self-documentation in order to gather pupils’ experiences and perspectives on how they encounter the Other through their music-making at school and in their everyday lives. A critical realist theoretical framework enabled the experiences and perspectives of pupils to be set within a deep, layered conception of social reality, uncovering the dynamic interplay of structural forces and pupil agency. Through the lens of Levinas’ philosophy pupils’ ‘practices of facing’ were brought to light and conceptualised as agential. ii From these ‘practices of facing’ the study’s conclusions are drawn. Music-making is conceptualised through terms in which Levinas spoke of language, as having as its first impetus a reaching out to the Other, ‘putting a world in common’. This grounds, and is generative of, an epistemological diversity within which aesthetic and praxial approaches are anchored in one underlying, ethical orientation, where the attentiveness and openness of aesthetic sensitivity are as significant as the developing of skills and competencies in enabling an ever-deeper entering-into ‘infinity in the face of the Other’. This study offers a critique of the present educational environment which prioritises predetermined outcomes and narrow models of knowing, thereby, according to a Levinasian view, legitimising practices of violence and domination, and sets out an alternative orientation, where richly contextualised learning in the music classroom and a radical openness might allow for an infinity of possibility to break in.

Among the works of theater of the Spanish Golden Age which feature a mujer varonil, Luis Vélez de Guevara's play, La serrana de la Vera (1613), is particularly provocative. The intensity and ambiguity of the dual nature of its female protagonist, Gila, has been the subject of much recent scholarly investigation. The staging of the play lends itself to a Levinian reading, a new approach to this particular text and theater of the Golden Age in general. Emmanuel Levinas moves beyond metaphysics, phenomenology and intentionality to posit ethics as first philosophy. Levinas explains that the face of the Other is a revelation before which my own presence is an epiphany and summons me into an ethical relationship before I am aware of my own being. A correct ethical relationship is maintained only when the Other is allowed her absolute alterity, otherwise the Other is subsumed into the matrix of the Self and the result is suffering. A Levinian reading of La serrana de la Vera moves beyond exploring systems of class and gender and discovers that the suffering in the play can be traced to face-to-face encounters in which individuals are unable or unwilling to truly see the face of the Other.

Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ipseity and alterity has permeated Western thought for more than forty years. In the social sciences and the humanities, the recognition of the Other and focus on difference, alterity, has influenced the way we ethically approach peoples and arts from different cultures. Because focus on the ego, ipseity, limits our ethical obligations, focusing on the Other does, according to Levinas, bring us closer to an ethical life. Furthermore, the self maintains responsibility for the Other and must work within Levinas's ethical system to become truly responsible. Therefore, the interaction between self and Other is Levinas's principal concern as we move toward the New Humanism. The traditional Western autobiography has been centered in the self, the ego, which may prevent the ethical interaction on the part of the writer because the writer often portrays himself or herself as exemplary or unique rather than as an individual within a culture who is responsible for others. Nevertheless, life writing has expanded as writers strive to represent themselves and their cultures responsibly. One form that has emerged is the literary autoethnography, a memoir that considers ancestry, culture, history, and spiritual inheritance amidst personal reflection. In particular, Native American conceptions of the self within story have inspired conventions of literary autoethnography. This project explores the way Native American worldviews have influenced the autoethnography by looking at four Native American authors: Janet Campbell Hale, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Carter Revard. Through research, family stories, interviews, and returns to ancestral spaces, autoethnographers can bring themselves and their readers closer to cultural consciousness. By investigating standards in autoethnographic works, this project will illustrate the ethical intentionality of autoethnography.

This study analyzed moral psychology's “moral judgment-moral action gap” research and found that morality was being described as a secondary phenomenon produced by underlying substrates (such as identity and self constructs, “brain modules,” and “evolved emotional systems”) which are themselves non-moral. Deriving morality from “the non-moral” presents a kind of ontological gap in the moral psychology research. Researchers implicitly close this gap assuming it is possible to get moral judgments and actions out of non-moral substrates. But the difficulty remains how the moral as “moral” becomes infused into any moral psychology models. Morality is not a secondary phenomenon arising out of something else. This study argues that there is a need to shift our understanding of what it means to be human, to a view in which the moral is fundamental. An alternative foundation for assessing the moral is found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas who sees ethics as a metaphysical concern. This means that he sees the essential moral character of human life and the reality of human agency as ontologically fundamental, or constitutive of human nature itself. In other words, the ethical is the “first cause” in regards to understanding the nature and action of the self. Thus morality is not merely epiphenomenal to some more fundamental reality. Levinas holds that as humans, we are called to the Other. This call of obligation to the Other comes before all other human endeavors. After presenting Levinas's alternative foundation of obligation to the Other which herein is labeled Felt Moral Obligation (FMO), C. Terry Warner's conceptualizations of FMO in relation to the moral judgment-action gap are presented. In light of these conceptualizations, this study argues that there is actually no moral judgment-moral action gap, but only holistic events of moral self-betrayal. Warner illustrates that rejecting FMO is a single moral event, a holistic act performed by a moral agent that involves moral responses of self-justification, offense-taking, and rationalization. The person finds him or herself in a state of self-betrayal. Levinas and Warner implicitly assert that such self-betraying responses are not fundamentally biological or rational, but rather, fundamentally moral.

This work explores three phenomenological views of subjectivity in light of methodological transitions within phenomenology since its inception. Jean-Luc Marion offers a critique of Husserl 's transcendental ego in Cartesian Questions. This critique characterizes Husserl's transcendental ego as a 'schizophrenic ego'. This criticism is aimed at phenomenology's intentionality thesis as well as the method of reduction(s). Marion is influenced by Emmanuel Levinas' ethics and takes issue with a 'theoretical bias' within Husserl 's thought, a bias that characterizes subjectivity in the same terms as objectivity. I frame Marion's and Levinas' views of subjectivity in terms of two seemingly opposed 'origins' of subjectivity: Marion's notion of subjectivity embraces a notion of an originally auto-affected subject, while Levinas' position privileges an originally hetero-affected subject. I argue that both these views of subjectivity remain within dualist perspectives. Both thinkers try to overturn a hierarchy of reason over sensation/ emotion/ feeling by calling for a radically passive institution of subjectivity through either a givenness prior to subjectivity (Marion) or the face to face encounter with an Other (Levinas). However, both positions end up instituting a new hierarchy, one where reason is subjugated to feeling. Rather than dismantling dualism both thinkers end up defending a revised hierarchical thinking. I argue that Husserl's transcendental ego is indeed a 'schizophrenic ego' (i.e., a split ego) in Marion's sense but that this is not a problem for classical phenomenology but an alternative to either an auto-affected subject or a hetero-affected subject. Husserl's works on internal time-consciousness and passive and active synthesis illustrate a necessary correlation between passivity/ activity, matter/ form, reason/ emotion, ego/ world and self/ other which moves beyond the hierarchical thinking associated with traditional dualist thought. Husserl's notions of correlation and synthesis actually suggest a subject that is always intentionally related to the world and others and is also intentionally self-related. The implicit aim of this work is to suggest an alternative to an ethics of irreducibility endorsed by both Marion and Levinas. Husserlian phenomenology offers the possibility of an ethics of reciprocity, which paradoxically does not undermine the irreducibility of the subject, others or the world. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)