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2015, Contemporary Political Theory
The inseparability of ethics and politics: Rethinking the third in Emmanuel Levinas, 2009
Review of International Studies, 2011
This article is principally concerned with the way some sophisticated critical approaches in International Relations (IR) tend to compromise their critical edge in their engagement with the self/other problematique. Critical approaches that understand critique as total non-violence towards, or unreflective affirmation of, alterity risk falling back into precritical paths. That is, either a particularistic, assimilative universalism with pretensions of true universality or a radical incommensurability and the impossibility of communication with the other. This is what this article understands as the paradox of the politics of critique. Instead, what is more important than seeking a final overcoming or dismissal of the self/other opposition is to gain the insight that it is the perpetual striving to preserve the tension and ambivalence between self and other that rescues both critique's authority and function.(Online publication May 21 2010)
My thesis contests a putative congruity between Derrida and Levinas concerning discussions of responsibility, ethics and otherness. It attends to the fundamental ‘metaphysical’ differences between the two with respect to ontology, language and historicity. Consequently, it foregrounds two distinct conceptions of philosophy, which differ with respect to task, strategy and presentational form. Since Levinas’s key notion of the ‘face’ [le visage], which cannot be equated to any actual countenance, breaks with phenomenality – no small issue for an avowed phenomenology – this thesis will begin by treating the category of the other (or Other) in Levinas’s writings as a conundrum. By analysing the two major topographies of the Other developed by Levinas in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being (with particular attention to their differences), I ask: who or what counts as the other for Levinas? Concurrently, I track Derrida’s writings across his career to see if he can be held to subscribe to either of these models, noting the transformations that Derrida effects upon Levinas. By analysing them in tandem, the metaphysical and speculative contours of both thinkers (which if not neglected in the secondary literature are transformed into quasi-theological positions) come to the fore. Thereby, this thesis seeks to revive questions of speculative thought in contemporary philosophy, whilst simultaneously asking how this speculative dimension preserves its status as philosophy despite its break with norms of written form and argumentation. Crucially, this is the terrain on which Derrida, in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, had first criticised Levinas – his lack of attention to language and presentation meant his writing remained non-philosophical.
This is a dissertation paper submitted for the Degree in Philosophy.
Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, 2018
This work addresses the topic of philosophical complexity, which shares certain assumptions with scientific complexity, cybernetics, and General Systems Theory, but which is also developing as a subject field in its own right. Specifically, the post-structural reading of philosophical complexity that was pioneered by Paul Cilliers is further developed in this study. To this end, the ideas of a number of contemporary French post-structural theorists and their predecessors - including Derrida, Nancy, Bataille, Levinas, Foucault, Saussure, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel - are introduced. The implications that their various insights hold for our understanding of complex human systems are teased out at the hand of the themes of economy, (social) ontology, subjectivity, epistemology, and ethics. The analyses are also illuminated at the hand of the problematic of the foreigner and the related challenges of showing hospitality to foreigners. The study presents a sophisticated account of both philosophical complexity and philosophies of difference. By relating these subject fields, the study also extends our understanding of philosophical complexity, and offers an original characterisation of the aforementioned philosophers as complex thinkers.
Contemporary Political Theory
Recent political critiques and appropriations of Emmanuel Levinas' work demonstrate the need to fundamentally reevaluate the meaning and status of his philosophy. Both the Marxist critiques (often apropos Lacan) and 'third wave' applications interpret Levinas' singular and unique relation to others-a bond which prohibits even the slightest trace of historical, hermeneutic, or political context-as the greatest obstacle to a Levinasian politics. From this standpoint, Levinas offers little more than a hyperbolic ethics that, at best, ignores, and, at worst, provides philosophical cover for, the political status quo (often defined by capitalism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism). To counter this established link between Levinas' philosophy and his potential for political thought, this article reexamines the significance of the decontextualized social relation. I argue that such interpretations misapprehend the intended analytical depth of Levinas' thought, which, in turn, misconstrue the relationship between Levinas and more traditional social ontologies. As a consequence, Levinas' valuable normative import for political theory is obscured. By shifting our perspective, we can understand Levinas as articulating a philosophy of political utopianism, well-suited to the challenges we face in our present conjuncture. (link below to the online version of the article)
Journal for Cultural Research, 2005
In his early essays “Violence and Metaphysics” and “The Ends of Man,” Jacques Derrida evoked a “community of the question” when he called for a fundamental questioning of the being of the “we” in the West. This demand was later formulated by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe as the philosophical interrogation of the political (le politique), in distinction from the question of politics (la politique). The essay begins by arguing that what is at stake in this distinction is the very possibility of politics that is otherwise foreclosed. It then explores Nancy’s interrogation of le politique in The Inoperative Community, and compares his response to Maurice Blanchot’s response in The Unavowable Community. It is argued that both deconstructions of “community” depict a certain sociality that corresponds to Derrida’s call – a ‘communality’ beyond or radically other than the traditional model of community as formed by sovereign individuals and as forming the sovereign state. Where they differ is that Blanchot founds the ethical relation of the “unavowable” community on the radical interruption of ontology signaled by death, whereas Nancy casts ontology itself in an ethical register, and thereby allows a certain solidarity to emerge as well.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2016
Refereed paper presented as, 2002
Law and Critique, 2013
International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2012)
Performance Studies and Negative Epistemology: Performance Apophatics, 2017
Contemporary Political Theory, 2017
Contemporary Political Theory, 2014
Studies in Social and Political Thought volume 20, winter 2012
Oxford Handbook of Levinas, 2018
Butler and Ethics, 2015
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2014
Journal of Analytical Psychology 56, 92–108, 2011
Theory Culture & Society, 2000
Loisir et Société / Society and Leisure, 1996
Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other, 2020