180103 SE Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics as First Philosophy (2011W)

The seminar provides a venue to approach the thought of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. It focuses his main thesis concerning an ethics of the other, which calls upon us to understand ethics as first philosophy. In the light of this thesis, we have to consider Levinas’ attempts at deconstructing the totalizing implications of traditional philosophical thought, which he blames for misappropriating the very otherness of the other. Hence, his attempt to found ethics is based upon the extraordinary significance that he finds in the wholly other and her unassimilable otherness.
Levinas’ thinking of the other beyond ist inclusion into the logics of the same opens pathways for a substantial reflection on the many faces of violence that negate the otherness of the other by way of repudiating it, assimilating it, incorporating or, finally, by destroying it. In this context, Levinas’ attempt to found ethics on the pre-normative appeal of the other, gains ist full significance: As will be shown throughout the seminar, we can regard his philosophy as a substantial contribution to contemporary philosophies of difference and as a powerful tool to decipher the actual as well as the implicit violences of everydayness, politics, law and culture..