Silvia Benso

What is Levinas's relation to Hegel, the thinker who seems to summarize everything which Levinas's philosophy opposes, yet with whom Levinas never enters a sustained philosophical engagement? An answer can be found through an analysis of the concept of work, understood both as activity of labor and product thereof. The concept of work reveals that, despite the apparent (but superficial) sense of opposition, Levinas's philosophy works in a deliberately noncommittal, or, to use a Levinasian expression, ``dis-interested'' mode with respect to Hegel. Such mode of disinterstedness expresses an ethical gesture of joyful hospitality that neither confirms nor refutes the German philosopher but rather opens him up to an eschatological dimension.

Levinas’s most important contribution to contemporary philosophy is his continual vindication of the primacy of the ethical. For the contemporary reader, educated in the shadow of the Nietzschean thought that existence as will to power is art, this claim comes as an uneasy surprise. What is the place of the aesthetic within the preeminence of the ethical in Levinas’s philosophy? Or, more specifically, what is, for Levinas, the place of art in relation to the ethical? Through a Levinasian reading of Plato, and a Platonic reading of Levinas, the paper argues in favor of Paul Celan’s statement that there is not “any basic difference... between a handshake and a poem.”