num_pages: 208
description: Combining elements from Heidegger’s philosophy of “being-in-the-world” and the tradition of Jewish theology, Levinas has evolved a new type of ethics based on a concept of “the Other” in two different but complementary aspects. He describes his encounters with those philosophers and literary authors (most of them his contemporaries) whose writings have most significantly contributed to the construction of his own philosophy of “Otherness”: Agnon, Buber, Celan, Delhomme, Derrida, Jabès, Kierkegaard, Lacroix, Laporte, Picard, Proust, Van Breda, Wahl, and, most notably, Blanchot.At the same time, Levinas’s own texts are inscriptions and documents of those encounters with “Others” around which his philosophy is turning. Thus the texts simultaneously convey an immediate experience of how his intellectual position emerged and how it is put into practice. A third potential function of the book is that it unfolds the network of references and persons in philosophical debates since Kierkegaard.The essays in this volume are both philosophical and literary, yet the mode of approach always remains philosophical. In treating those figures with whom Levinas most fruitfully engaged, he seeks the theoretical perspectives most helpful in clarifying their work, but his main concern is to bring out what he sees as the significance of their writings. Throughout, the predominant leitmotif in the essays is the precarious role of poetic and philosophical language in making possible the encounter with "the Other."
language: English
title: Proper Names
titlecomplete: Proper Names (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
genres: Philosophy, France
ratings_count: 28
publisher: Stanford University Press