Richard A. Cohen

Levinas: thinking least about death—contra heidegger

Detailed exposition of the nine layers of signification of human mortality according to Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological and ethical account of the meaning and role of death for the embodied human subject and its relations to other persons. Critical contrast to Martin Heidegger’s alternative and hitherto more influential phenomenological-ontological conception, elaborated in Being and Time (1927), of mortality as Dasein’s anxious and revelatory being-toward-death.

Ethics and cybernetics: Levinasian reflections

Is cybernetics good, bad, or indifferent? SherryTurkle enlists deconstructive theory to celebrate thecomputer age as the embodiment of “difference.” Nolonger just a theory, one can now live a “virtual” life. Within a differential but ontologically detachedfield of signifiers, one can construct and reconstructegos and environments from the bottom up andendlessly. Lucas Introna, in contrast, enlists theethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to condemn thesame computer age for increasing the distance betweenflesh and blood people. Mediating the face-to-facerelation between real people, allowing and encouragingcommunication at a distance, information technologywould alienate individuals from the social immediacyproductive of moral obligations and responsibilities. In this paper I argue against both of thesepositions, and for similar reasons. Turklescelebration and Intronas condemnation of informationtechnology both depend, so I will argue, on the samemistaken meta-interpretation of it. Like Introna,however, but to achieve a different end, I will enlistLevinass ethical philosophy to make this case.

IS AL QAEDA POSTMODERN

Abstract A review of: Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 184pp.

Time and the Other

25.00. Devji asserts that terrorists are postmodern. However, the evidence for this thesis is unconvincing. The assumption is based on the idea that terrorists are offering a structural, or “ethical”, challenge to the nation-state system by opposing traditional and central authorities. But Devjis use of the term ethical is in itself postmodern because it creates a relative definition of the idea of ethics or morals, and it is therefore problematic. Devji confuses ethics with the contemporary notion of personal or existential authenticity, unwittingly conceding support where in fact the greatest criticism is demanded.