Annabel Herzog

Levinas on the Social: Guilt and the City

This paper focuses on Levinas’s understanding of the social as distinguished from the political. In his neo-phenomenological work, Levinas never conceptualized the difference between the political and the social, because he was more interested in the difference between the ethical and everything else. In his Talmudic Readings, however, with the help of examples or paradigms, he offers a vision of a social domain distinct from the political one. This paper concentrates on the Talmudic Readings to delineate those situations in which Levinas distinguishes such a specifically social realm. It analyzes Levinas’s understanding of the city as paradigm of liberalism’s shortcomings and elaborates on the absence of the social in Levinas’s conception of a good life.

Justice or Freedom: Camus’s Aporia

This article argues that Camus’s thinking, as expressed in his works of fiction and non-fiction, is based upon a contradiction between his determination to reconcile politics and ethics and his belief that they irrefutably contradict each other. Throughout his career, Camus’s concerns never diverged from his aporetic attempt to reach an ‘agreement’ between two concepts he regarded as incompatible: justice and freedom. This article demonstrates how this basic aporia led Camus to an original - albeit rather hopeless - view of the human condition. It illustrates how Camus’s aporia led him to define the role of thinkers in terms of public criticism and argues that in today’s sociopolitical reality Camus’s aporia can neither be dismissed, nor overcome.

Hobbes and Corneille on Political Representation

In this essay, I compare the meaning of political representation in Hobbes’ Leviathan and Corneilles Cinna. For both authors, a monarch is a “representer” and representation is a necessary condition of effective sovereignty. However, the term “representation” means something entirely different in Hobbes and in Corneille. For the former, it means acting and speaking in the name of a multitude and in its absence; for the latter, it means acting and speaking in the presence of a political public, with the intention to impress this audience. I would like to argue that our late modern (or postmodern) conception of sovereignty can be seen as being (unconsciously) based on the conjunction of Hobbes’ and Corneilles different notions of representation.

Dogs and Fire: The Ethics and Politics of Nature in Levinas

In Levinas’s philosophy, “nature” refers to two distinct and sometimes opposed concepts. Most often it stands for being and perseverance in being (i.e., conatus): it is what is and wants to be. In some places, however, “nature” indicates the limits of human power, violence, or hubris, and reveals the uncanny unlimitedness of transcendence. In other words, “nature” designates primarily the ontological character of Creation but also sometimes the otherness beyond ontology. It expresses the egoistic but also sometimes the altruistic. It commonly discourages ethics but also sometimes encourages it. The aim of this paper is to analyze how these two meanings of “nature” meet and contradict each other in Levinas’s philosophy, and to interpret their meeting and contradiction. Levinas never offers a studied reflection on nature per se. However, his Talmudic Readings include descriptions of nature as both ontological and inspiring the ethical. Reinterpreting some of the Readings I show that, for Levinas, nature is associated with war, conquest and destruction, but is sometimes presented as the cure for these ontological evils. In other words, its function is similar to that of politics. It embodies a necessity that must be moderated by an ethics which, in a way, comes from nature itself.

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy. By Robert C. Pirro. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. 224p.

Hannah Arendts so-called nostalgia for the Greek polis stands at the core of most readings of her work, especially in debates between proponents of her concept of action as agonistic and interpreters of this concept as associational or communicative. Many feminist theorists, participatory democrats, and liberals share an aversion to Arendts philhellenism and criticize her machismo, her apparent neglect of Athenian injustice, and her “republicanism,” with its potential for endangering individual autonomy. Similarly, Arendts emphasis on the political relevance of stories and her self-acknowledged storytelling have also given rise to extensive interpretations. Arendt scholars, in line with many contemporary political theorists, reject the totalizing and universalizing power of theory and argue that human plurality is better expressed in stories than in abstract homogeneous theory. According to them, by exemplifying or illuminating general intuitions and propositions, storytelling concretizes the understanding of politics. They suggest that stories allow the political thinker to be critical and situated. Moreover, stories take into account forgotten parts of history, or forgotten parts of the political sphere, often denied in theories that cannot accept difference and contingency.