Download Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics by Mari Ruti PDF

By Mari Ruti

Levinas and Lacan, giants of up to date concept, symbolize colleges of suggestion that appear poles aside. during this significant new paintings, Mari Ruti charts the moral terrain among them.

At first look, Levinansian and Lacanian ways could appear kind of incompatible, and in lots of methods they're, relatively of their knowing of the self-other courting. For either Levinas and Lacan, the subject's courting to the opposite is fundamental within the experience that the topic, actually, doesn't exist with no the opposite, yet they see the problem of ethics rather otherwise: whereas Levinas laments our failure to safely meet the moral call for coming up from the opposite, Lacan laments the implications of our failure to properly break out the types this call for often takes.

Although this booklet outlines the main modifications among Levinas and Judith Butler at the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou at the different, Ruti proposes that beneath those alterations you can still determine a shared difficulty with the thorny dating among the singularity of expertise and the universality of ethics.

Between Levinas and Lacan is a crucial new booklet for someone attracted to modern concept, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.

Show description

Read or Download Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics PDF

Similar literary theory books

Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity

This cutting edge e-book finds the total quantity of electricity's value in 19th- and early-twentieth-century tradition. Ranging throughout an unlimited array of fabrics, Sam Halliday indicates how electrical energy functioned as either a method of representing "other" things--from love and unity to embodiment and temporality--and as an item of illustration in its personal correct.

Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation

Fiction writers and critics interact the classy, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of up to date fiction.

Discourse Analysis

Discourse research is a time period that has come to have diverse interpretations for students operating in numerous disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it's involved as a rule with the constitution of social interplay manifested in dialog; for a psycholinguist, it truly is basically excited about the character of comprehension of brief written texts; for the computational linguist, it's excited by generating operational types of text-understanding inside of hugely constrained contexts.

Extra resources for Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics

Sample text

Pain, in short, is seen as a tool of personal growth. Moreover, it has often been deemed necessary for pedagogical, utilitarian, or Breaking the obstinacy of being 17 other progress-oriented personal or social projects (as is evident in the everyday motto of “no pain, no gain”). But no social entity has been more powerful in conjuring away the meaninglessness of suffering than religion, for the believer is rewarded for his or her suffering by the kingdom of God (where all suffering finally ceases).

What I am saying is that a greater degree of attention to the systematic power differentials that permeate the field of intimacy reveals the (unintended) cruelty intrinsic to this model. Likewise, a greater degree of attention to the inequalities of power in both national and international contexts might disclose the (again, unintended) brutality that adheres to an ethics premised on a masochistic subject who, as Levinas states, “has promised itself that it will carry the whole responsibility of the world” (DF 89).

In other words, 14 Between Levinas and Lacan behind justice reside the mercy and kindness of ethics: “It is in the name of that responsibility for the other, in the name of that mercy, that kindness to which the face of the other man appeals, that the entire discourse of justice is set in motion” (EN 229). Yet justice tends to lose track of its roots in mercy and kindness, which means that it needs to be continually perfected “against its own harshness” (EN 229); it needs to be reminded of its debt to ethics.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.71 of 5 – based on 32 votes