Jacob Meskin

This dissertation examines the work of Emmanuel Levinas from the perspective of the philosophy of religion. It explores the various strategies through which Levinas seeks to integrate a significant conception of transcendence into strictly philosophical discourse. Thus the present work restricts its analysis to Levinas' two major philosophical texts, Totality and Infinity, and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. ;It is argued herein that the concepts of language and revelation play a pivotal role in Levinas' philosophical project, and in particular that these two concepts form the heart of Levinas' argument that we encounter absolute otherness in the face-to-face encounter between human beings. The dissertation analyzes these two concepts, the relationship between them, and the way in which Levinas' understanding of them changes over the course of his philosophical career. ;After comparing Levinas' view of language with that of Jacques Derrida, and working through Levinas' methodological remarks, the dissertation reaches three basic conclusions. ;First of all the concept of luxury, and its equivalents "gratuity", "folly" and "enigma" in Levinas' later work, will play a crucial role in Levinas' attempt to reconcile revelation and philosophy. The concept of luxury, hitherto ignored in studies of Levinas, provides Levinas with a way to express the radically unforeseeable and disruptive character of revelation in philosophical terms. ;Secondly, Levinas' philosophical position in his later work embodies a clearly religious worldview, one that might be called "prophetic messianism". Thus the distinction between Levinas' "philosophical writings" and his "religious or Jewish writings" may have to be modified or abandoned entirely. ;Finally, Levinas' view of language, which remains connected with an idea of revelation, maintains the primacy of ethics or prophecy in the phenomenon of language. This challenges all philosophies of language which accord primacy to the impersonality, instrumentality, or systematicity of language

Agamben’s notion of the ‘paradigm’ has far-reaching implications for educational thinking, curriculum design and pedagogical conduct. In his approach, examples—or paradigms—deeply engage our powers of analogy, enabling us to discern previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of classification. In this way we come to envision novel groupings, new patterns of connection—that nonetheless do not simply reassemble those singular objects into yet another rigidly fixed set or class. Agamben sees this sort of ‘paradigmatic understanding’ as our richest source of intelligibility. For Agamben the paradigm is ultimately about learning to see again, starting not with already perfectly known and categorized objects (or ideas), but rather with a fresh experience of one individual object and the analogical relations it may have to others, and to novel groupings that may arise. The paradigm is a method, a way in which educators might respond to a wide range of educational challenges. For a paradigmatic relation suspends while exposing, deactivates while revealing, complicates while clarifying. But articulating the enigmatic paradigmatic relation between example and class is far more than a method. It is epistemological (a way of knowing and conception of knowledge), ethical (a fostering of freedom from presupposed categories and reified principles) and ontological (a type of being that exposes the potential of knowing and communicating—their intelligibility and communicability). In these qualities, paradigms exhibit to educators a free, a new use of singularities.

In 1982 the American philosopher and Levinas scholar Edith Wyschogrod conducted an interview with Emmanuel Levinas, the transcript of which she published seven years later. Early in the interview, Wyschogrod proposed to Levinas that his philosophy constituted a radical break with western theological tradition because it started not with a Parmenidean ontological plenitude, but rather with the God of the Hebrew Bible. The God Levinas began with, according to Wyschogrod, wasan indigent God, a hidden God who commands that there be a world apart from God, because God needs the multiplicity of the world in order for there to be justice. Levinas responds to this proposal: That’s quite right. Justice, I call it responsibility for the other, right? There is even in Totality and Infinity, the evocation of the tzimtzum [the idea in kabbalistic writings of the self-contraction of God in order to create the void in which creation can take place], but I won’t venture into that.

In 1982 the American philosopher and Levinas scholar Edith Wyschogrod conducted an interview with Emmanuel Levinas, the transcript of which she published seven years later. Early in the interview, Wyschogrod proposed to Levinas that his philosophy constituted a radical break with western theological tradition because it started not with a Parmenidean ontological plenitude, but rather with the God of the Hebrew Bible. The God Levinas began with, according to Wyschogrod, wasan indigent God, a hidden God who commands that there be a world apart from God, because God needs the multiplicity of the world in order for there to be justice. Levinas responds to this proposal: That’s quite right. Justice, I call it responsibility for the other, right? There is even in Totality and Infinity, the evocation of the tzimtzum [the idea in kabbalistic writings of the self-contraction of God in order to create the void in which creation can take place], but I won’t venture into that.