Silvia Benso

The current and the next issues of “Spazio Filosofico”, both devoted to Festival (Festival I and II respectively), are dedicated to Ugo Perone on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Perone’s friends and colleagues have chosen to celebrate his birthday in a philosophical way, namely, with a reflection on the concept of festival/holiday [festa] and its meaning for us today. Thrifty spirits might object that a journal issue is like a gift – one is enough. Are these not times of economic crisis? There is no real festival, however, without a Zugabe: without an addition, an encore, or a supplement. Hence, two issues, both devoted to a single concept. The choice of the theme has not been accidental – the concept of “festival/holiday” plays in fact an important role in Perone’s thought. In an essay that is often quoted in various contributions to the two issues, Perone understands the pair of concepts “ultimate/penultimate,” which has been discussed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in terms of “holidays/everydayness.” For Bonhoeffer, God is present not where human abilities fail but rather “at the center of the village.” Likewise, for Perone, the square, which is the “symbol for the holiday time,” is the center of town. It is even, “at the same time, the center of town and its interruption.”

Moving from Heidegger’s suggestion that philosophy has fallen into the Thaletian well because of its inadequate theorization of the essence of things, I retrace in Heidegger’s description of things as gathering elements that enable a discourse on things in terms of their alterity,· I explore the richness of such an alterity in its differing from Levinas’s otherness of the other person; I suggest the formulation of an ethics of things which, through a reciprocal exposure of Heidegger and Levinas, might rescue philosophy from its fall into the Thaletian well.Suite à la thèse de Heidegger selon laquelle la philosophie, depuis qu’elle théorise I’essence des choses, aurait chuté dans le puits de Thalès, j’identifie, à partir de la description heideggérienne de la chose comme rassemblement, les elements qui rendent possible un discours sur les choses en tant qu’altérité. J’explore la richesse d’une telle altérité en ce qu’elle diffire de I’altérité lévinassienne de I’autre personne. Je propose la formulation d’une ethique des choses qui, par I’éclaircissement réciproque de Heidegger et de Lévinas, pourrait prévenir la chute de la philosophie dans le puits de Thalès.

Traditional ethics has ignored the metaphysics of things, reduced the relation to things to a relation to objects in opposition to subjects, and consequently legitimized the subject's domination over the objects. My dissertation provides a metaphysical and ethical foundation for reappraising the value of things by both challenging and retrieving different aspects of Levinas's and Heidegger's philosophies. ;Levinas considers the Other as the authority capable of suspending the subject's tendency to unlimited power and domination, mistakenly understood as freedom. Ethics is the place of the suspension of violence and of the encounter with the Other. Yet, the Other is only the other person. As in traditional ethics, things remain instrumental to the relation between the I and the Other. ;Heidegger's notion of thinghood, retraced through a tortuous path of thinking leading from the early works to the later essays, is not ethically colored. Nevertheless, it preserves the Otherness of things thanks to their simultaneous mirroring of the mortals, the gods, the sky, and the earth. ;My dissertation extends Levinas's notion of ethics to Heidegger's notion of things and develops an ethics where tenderness is the essential category. Tenderness is a peculiar mode of touch. It allows us contact with things, but is not subject to the abuses of technological manipulation and as a consequence is respectful of the irreducible Otherness of things

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.”