Ethical and political anarchy in Emmanuel Levinas : ethics as a disarticulation of the State

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Christopher James Eland
• Orientador(a): Ester Vaisman Chasin
• Banca de defesa: Leonardo Meirelles Ribeiro, Fabiano Victor de Oliveira Campos, Ozanan Vicente Carrara, Ângela Cristina Salgueiro Marques
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Filosofia
• Departamento: FAF - DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOSOFIA
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Levinas; Ethics; Political philosophy; Anarchy; Anarchism
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/35553

This work seeks to describe the political fate of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical phenomenology. Unlike many of his contemporaries in post-war continental philosophy, Levinas never engaged in the directly political issues at the level of political rationality. This has caused some readers of Levinas, such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, to dismiss Levinas’s work as simply utopian pining for an unreachable ethical ideal. But in my view, Levinas’s work is deeply political even if it is not directly political. What I mean by this is that his work is constantly motivated by the political problem of evil as it arose in the political context of the 20th century. Further, I argue that his ethical phenomenology specifically seeks to overcome this politics by escaping the cycle of political rationality. This research focuses on the way Levinas’s direct opposition to the traditional political order culminates in a call for a “pluralist society” in the conclusion of Totality and Infinity and a “monotheistic politics” in his confessional Talmudic writings. In those passages, it becomes clear that Levinas’s work serves not only to criticize Heidegger and ontological philosophy, but functions in broader terms as a concrete critique of the political totality of the State. Thus, the objective of the current analysis is to orient this critique of the State within the context of political theory, specifically as his work relates to the tradition of political anarchism.