The intervention of the other
Subtitle: ethical subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan
By: David Ross Fryer
Publisher: Other Press; Other Press Professional
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 254
Subjects: Lévinas, Emmanuel -- Ethics; Lacan, Jacques, -- 1901-1981 -- Ethics; Other (Philosophy)
Description: "Emmanuel Levinas, French philosopher, was suspicious of psychoanalysis, to say the least. Following Sartre and others, Levinas thought that Freud had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of consciousness, while Levinas's own work celebrated a certain something that could not be contained by thought. Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalyst, was, in turn, suspicious of philosophical ethics: Lacan subscribed to a Freudian critique of ethics as pathogenic, though he did see his own work as fundamentally about a kind of ethics, specifically an ethics concerned with how people live their lives in an already normative society.

While the two never engaged with each other's thought directly, Levinas and Lacan were each interested in many of the same questions: What is it to be a subject? What is the subject's relation to the Other? Can the ethical be grounded in a post-foundationalist world? Through close textual analysis, David Ross Fryer brings the ideas of these two seemingly disparate thinkers into productive dialogue, showing how Levinas and Lacan offer two alternate yet complementary ways of thinking about the ethical subject in the post-humanist landscape of contemporary thought."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [239]-245) and index
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Post-humanism and ethical subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan; title: The other and the self : creating the subject; title: Sexed subjectivity, symbolic subjectivity; title: Linguistic subjectivity and the speaking subject; title: Ethical subjectivity : God, an-archy, the subject, and desire; title: Conclusion: Post-humanist ethical subjectivity