Tag: Existentialism

May 9, 2014

De L’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics

Book II — Foreigner, Here : Existentialist Foreignness
— Introduction

Back to the foreigner proper. What has the first-person voice of a foreigner to do in a philosophical exploration of foreignness ? …

May 9, 2014

De L’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics

Book II — Foreigner, Here : Existentialist Foreignness
— Part 1

Why is one departing ? Can one depart ? But depart from where ? …

May 9, 2014

De L’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics

Book II — Foreigner, Here : Existentialist Foreignness
— Part 2

Dasein : “being-there.” Heidegger knew the connotation…

May 9, 2014
December 6, 2013

Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Introduction
Emmanuel Levinas is not a philosopher of love. The Lithuanian-born, French Jewish thinker gave birth to a rather substantial œuvre, writing for nearly seventy years on a variety of themes and questions. If love appears in the prose of Levinas, it is not as a topic in itself…

December 6, 2013

Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 1
It is undeniable that Levinas tends to submit numbers of formulations, expressions or hypotheses that seem, to say the least, controversial. In Existents and Existence, Levinas states, “the other par excellence is the feminine,” a proposition that would be complemented, one year later in Time and the Other with the view that the pure “essence” of the feminine is otherness or alterity…

December 6, 2013

Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 2
The richness of Levinas’s prose allows for numerous possible interpretations. Levinas is an author who is very careful with his words. This is the consideration that has led a number of commentators to try retrieving the sources of Levinas’s more or less controversial statements on the feminine…

December 6, 2013

An Ethics of Love – Epigraph
This is why through the face
filters the obscure light
coming from beyond the face,
from what is not yet,
from a future never future enough,
more remote than the possible.

December 6, 2013

An Ethics of Love – Part 1.1
Levinas writes about the encounter of the Other as a ‘perturbation’ or ‘interruption’ of our everyday human experience. The Other is not only the shelter, or the incarnated form, of the Infinite. It is, for Levinas, what complexifies our spontaneous understanding of time itself. Time is what gets interrupted by the Other

December 6, 2013

An Ethics of Love – Part 1.2
French language contains one interesting expression, which we could borrow to further discuss the encounter of the loved Other in and after Levinas: the point de fuite. Levinas does not make a use of this expression. The point de fuite is principally a technical term, belonging to the field of photography and visual art…