Christopher Cohoon

Luce Irigaray's provocative vision of eros is often expressed in what Elizabeth Grosz calls “rambling and apparently disconnected” language, and nowhere in Irigaray's texts is it presented as a coherent account. With the goal of elaborating the significance of Irigaray's vision, I here set out to construct such an account. After first defining the Irigarayan erotic encounter as a paradoxical conjunction of “separation and alliance,” I then aim to show that its structure may be productively interpreted in terms of six co-present modes: (i) wonder, the affective mode; (ii) touch, the sensuous mode; (iii) transgression, the subjective mode; (iv) fluidity, the elemental mode; (v) future, the temporal mode; and (vi) threeness, the numerical mode. From this interpretation, I argue, there emerges a new understanding of the immense power of Irigarayan eros as a “sexual or carnal ethics” and as a constitutive force not only for embodied subjectivity and intersubjectivity but also for sexual difference itself

As a corrective to readers who come to Levinas only for the ethics of the face, it is sometimes pointed out that before Levinas was a philosopher of ethics he was a philosopher of transcendence. Yet we can go further: before Levinas was a philosopher of transcendence—of escape—he was a philosopher of inescapability and, in particular, of bodily inescapability. This idea, which I call “corporeal facticity,” was introduced in what is perhaps Levinas’s first piece of original philosophy, the remarkable and perversely titled 1934 essay “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Inherent in embodied existence, Levinas observes, there is an “intuition” of self-“enchainment” or “adherence,” of being not merely “in”...

According to Aristotle’s reply to what I call the divine wish aporia (NE VIII.7 1159a5–12), perfect friendship entails wishing many great goods for one’s friend, but precludes wishing that one’s friend become a god—“the greatest of goods”—for the realization of this wish would destroy the friendship. Counter both to this reply and to the slim body of existing commentary, which appeals to the external criterion of equalizable reciprocation, I demonstrate how the perspective internal to the virtuous activity of perfect friendship affords properly Aristotelian grounds for retaining the divine wish as its constitutive limit. While the practicable scope of perfect friendship remains circumscribed within human limits, its characteristic wishing at once reaches beyond the human—and the friendship.

In her analyses of human ecological alienation, Val Plumwood implies that the recalcitrant problem of human exceptionalism is sustained in part by a kind of imaginative failure, by a certain blind spot to the ecological edibility of the human body. Among the many assumptions responsible for the blind spot, Plumwood suggests, is the liberal conception of the body as something proprietary, as something one owns. Plumwood’s work therefore establishes a new, if counterintuitive, task for environmental philosophy: to find or create models of human embodiment that do not preempt but rather enable access to edibility. One such model can be found in Emmanuel Levinas’s late concept of the pre-egoic ethical body. This otherwise elusive and frequently neglected concept ought to be understood as a boldly materialist appropriation of Plotinian emanationism. So understood, it provides a path beyond the blind spot that Plumwood identifies. Taking up Levinas in this way opens a new path for environmental philosophy into his idiosyncratic thought—a path distinct, that is, from the standard extensionist maneuver of seeking nonhuman applications for his ultra-humanist notion of the face.

Plumwood’s late work articulates two intertwined “historic tasks”: re-situating “non-human life in ethical terms” and “human life in ecological terms.” Her well-known thesis of “weak panpsychism,” an explicit rival to moral extensionism, represents her primary approach to the first task. Her approach to the second task, however, is less conspicuous. My aim is to identify and develop this approach, which, I suggest, mobilizes the fraught idea of human edibility into a certain mimetic and critical mode of extensionism that I call trophic extensionism. Inverting moral extensionist logic, it extends not moral considerability to animals but literal edibility to humans. Plumwood’s trophic extensionism both revitalizes weak panpsychism—re-vealing an unexpected link between food and mind—and generates a bold new conception of food: no longer an ontological category, food becomes an ecological relation defined by epistemological vulnerability.

According to Aristotle’s reply to what I call the divine wish aporia (NE VIII.7 1159a5–12), perfect friendship entails wishing many great goods for one’s friend, but precludes wishing that one’s friend become a god—“the greatest of goods”—for the realization of this wish would destroy the friendship. Counter both to this reply and to the slim body of existing commentary, which appeals to the external criterion of equalizable reciprocation, I demonstrate how the perspective internal to the virtuous activity of perfect friendship affords properly Aristotelian grounds for retaining the divine wish as its constitutive limit. While the practicable scope of perfect friendship remains circumscribed within human limits, its characteristic wishing at once reaches beyond the human—and the friendship.

This paper proposes a heterodox reading of Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being by means of a hitherto unacknowledged lineage run-ning from Plotinus through Nietzsche to Levinas. Its claim is two-fold. (1) Throughout Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and especially in its important speech on the “gift-giving virtue,” Nietzsche corporealiz-es and ethicizes Plotinian emanationist metaphysics, borrowing from it the notion of an auto-generosity that is extravagant and non-substantial. (2) Levinas’s late conception of embodied ethical giving in Otherwise Than Being borrows from this borrowing, al-beit in a way that draws more deeply on the logic of emanationism than Zarathustra does. Interpreting Levinas through Plotinus and Nietzsche in this way provides access to a version of his late ac-count of embodied ethical giving that is much stranger than the ul-tra-humanist version typically foregrounded both in the literature and in his self-presentation.