Submitted by Irene Nascimento (irene.kessia@ufpe.br) on 2016-06-27T17:33:44Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) DISSERTACAO_CJEland_DEFINITIVA.pdf: 1117645 bytes, checksum: 72bd32d2e20b55b08b4f94191834359b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-27T17:33:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) DISSERTACAO_CJEland_DEFINITIVA.pdf: 1117645 bytes, checksum: 72bd32d2e20b55b08b4f94191834359b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-02-02 / CAPES / A presente dissertação tem como objetivo examinar a relação entre o conceito de fraternidade nos primeiros escritos de Emmanuel Levinas, especialmente em Totalidade e Infinito, e suas obras posteriores sobre Direitos Humanos a fim de investigar uma possível fundamentação não liberal para os Direitos Humanos na contemporaneidade. Para tanto, será necessário explicitar como a obra de Levinas sobre a relação ética para com o Outro que fundamenta sua ideia de Direitos Humanos se ancora na relação política para com o terceiro. O conceito de fraternidade, como a não-indiferença universal para com o Outro, implica o conteúdo dessa relação ética que vai além da ética e permeia as categorias tradicionalmente políticas do pensamento filosófico. Assim, através da leitura relacional entre o conceito de Direitos Humanos e o conceito de fraternidade, que toma forma política na figura do terceiro, torna-se claro que a perspectiva de Levinas sobre os direitos como direitos dos outros se opõe a uma leitura liberal do seu trabalho, podendo, portanto, apontar para uma leitura não liberal dos direitos humanos na atualidade. / This dissertation seeks to examine the relationship between Emmanuel Levinas’s early work on fraternity, especially Totality and Infinity, and his later work on Human Rights in order to investigate the possibility of a non-liberal foundation for Human Rights in the contemporary world. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to develop the way in which Levinas’s work on the ethical relation to the Other serves as the foundation of his concept of Human Rights and anchors the political relation to the third party. The concept of fraternity, as a universal non-indifference to the Other, implies the content of the ethical relation which goes beyond ethics and reaches into traditionally political categories of philosophical thought. As such, by reading Levinas’s concept of Human Rights in relation to this early concept of fraternity, which takes its political form through the third party, his account of rights as the rights of the other stands in clear opposition to a liberal understanding of his work and describes a non-liberal account of human rights in the contemporary world.

I have structured my master's thesis in terms of an opposition between Kojeve's existentialist, Marxist philosophical formulation of Hegel's Phenomenology and Levinas's post-Heideggerian, anti-Hegelian phenomenology in Totality and Infinity. While Levinas's project is explicitly anti-totalitarian, Kojeve's reading of the Phenomenology emphasizes the End of History in Hegel's philosophy without shrinking from its totalizing aspects. While the philosophical project of each thinker is generally antithetical to the other, it is my contention that the universal and homogeneous state, conceived by Kojeve to be the rational realization of the end of history, is a legitimate moral project for Levinasian ethics. This thesis provides both an exegesis of Kojeve's reading of Hegel's master/slave dialectic in the Phenomenology and an interpretation of the tragedy of the slave understood in terms of Holderlin's theory of the tragic. It is through the master/slave dialectic that history consummates in the end of history. Later in the thesis, I outline Levinas's project as an ethics as first philosophy in opposition to the Eleatic traditions in Western philosophy. We can trace Levinas's project in his unconventional reading of the cogito and the idea of infinity. Whereas Descartes represents a philosophical return home for Hegel, Levinas's reading of Descartes represents a philosophical sojourn away from home in the second movement of the Meditations. With these notions, we have a formal basis in accounting for the conflict in Levinas's thought between the moral necessity of universal rights and the dangers of assimilation. Finally, I argue for why the universal and homogeneous state is an ethically worthy goal from a Levinasian perspective. On this question, I engage the thought of a number of thinkers of the left: Kojeve, Derrida, Horkheimer, Adorno and Zizek. I conclude that Levinas's thought on universalism and eschatology can serve as a moral basis for the left-Hegelian project of realizing a universal and homogeneous state. Because such a state is distinguishable from a totalizing End of History, the eschatological concern for one's singularity within history is compatible with the prophetic call to strive for political universality. Ultimately, it is the responsibility to this prophetic call that guarantees one's singularity.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to elucidate the ambiguous relation between the concepts of absolute alterity (tout Autre), there is (il y a) and the element (L'élément) in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The investigation starts with a presupposition, that the above-mentioned concepts can all be considered a form of alterity. First part of the thesis thematises il y a against the backdrop of two seminal texts - From Existence to Existents and Time and the Other - and also in relation to Martin Heidegger's philosophy. Second part is structured around the analysis of the element, as it is presented in Totality and infinity. Part three deals with the concept of absolute alterity, which is contrasted to the conception of the totalizing subject. In the last part of the thesis, these three distinct kinds of alterity are brought into relation and qualitatively differentiated from one another. Key words: Levinas, Heidegger, alterity, radical alterity, totality, il y a, there is, element, From Existence to Existents, Totality and Infinity, Time and the Other