EBOOK
Levinas's Ethical Politics
Michael L. MorganSeries: Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies(0)
About
Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas's thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas's ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings-including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state-which are controversial reflections of Levinas's political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas's political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds.
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Reviews
"Michael L. Morgan provides an intriguing alternative to much current thinking in political philosophy. His reading of Levinas amounts to a rigorous but flexible vision of the simultaneous indispensability of political justice and its necessary vulnerability to ethical critique."
Stephen Mulhall, author of The Self and its Shadows: A Book of Essays on Individuality as
"Against the prevailing consensus that Levinas's political theory is at best irrelevant and at worst hypocritical, Michael L. Morgan vigorously defends its abiding power. Through a painstaking analysis of Levinas's oeuvre, including his controversial interview after the massacres at Sabra and Chatila, he allows us to appreciate the potential an ethics of infinite responsibility may still have to t
Martin Jay, author of Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory