{"title":"Levinas, Feminism, and Temporality","authors":"Cynthia D. Coe","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190455934.013.50","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190455934.013.50","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter analyzes Levinas’s references to the feminine and the maternal through their connection to his treatment of time. Totality and Infinity provides a progressive narrative in which subjects are confronted with their responsibility to the other, and the feminine plays an instrumental role within that narrative. By contrast, Otherwise than Being discusses maternity in an anti-teleological, non-linear register. The maternal body is not the precursor to the ethical relation but an experience of ethical exposure, and one that confounds chronological representation. The concept of the maternal in Levinas’s later work thus more radically challenges the ideal of the “virile” subject, in ways that are congruent with feminist critiques, despite the fact that Levinas himself does not develop those possibilities.","PeriodicalId":330462,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Levinas","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117329416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Levinas, Literature, and Philosophy","authors":"S. Hand","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190455934.013.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190455934.013.51","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores posthumously published poems and fragments of novels by Levinas. It shows how seriously Levinas considered abandoning philosophy at a key moment in favor of writing novels. It examines how this calls into question some of Levinas’s positions regarding literature in the postwar period. It looks at how the thematics of his artistic plans conflict with ethical postulations in his major works. It traces relations between these plans and the work of key influential writers like Blanchot. It considers how these novelististic experiments recast Levinas’s essays on aesthetics. And it reflects on how knowledge of this work by Levinas must now inform our appreciation of his philosophical publications.","PeriodicalId":330462,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Levinas","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115158819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}