Joe Larios

This paper seeks to consider the similarities between Kierkegaard’s life stages and Lacan’s orders to demonstrate that we can understand each description in a structurally similar way to the other. Accordingly, a reading of Kierkegaard is developed that uses his life stages to describe a metapsychology, and a reading of Lacan is developed that shows how his orders can be conceived of progressively. All this leads to a further analysis of the different ways in which each stage relates to repetition and a culmination in which the achievement of faith in Kierkegaard is thought together with the analytic cure in Lacan.

By bringing the work of Arendt and Levinas together, this paper hopes to show a possible avenue for addressing the lack of a heteronomous object guiding the public realm in Arendt. This is first clarified with reference to the lack of a clear criterion for the deployment of violence as found in On Violence and proceeds to show how a criterion can be excavated from her comments elsewhere and clarified through a comparison with the thought of Levinas in which there is a heteronomous factor guiding action—the Other. What is uncovered is a similar framework in which the preservation of the world, as the space of appearances, becomes that which justifies actions. Moreover, it is argued that the social can become an object of concern precisely because of the changed nature of this world owing to modern technology.

Emmanuel Levinas’s work seemingly places a great emphasis on language leading some commentators towards a Kantian reading of him where moral consideration would be based on the moral patient’s capacity for reason with language functioning as a proxy for this. Although this reading is possible, a closer look at Levinas’s descriptions of language reveal that its defining characteristic is not reason but the capacity to express beyond any thematized contents we would give to the Other. This expressivity (which Levinas calls face) would confront me with their singularity, infinity, and interiority tying me to them in a relation of responsibility. And the “content” of such an expression is a vulnerability and exposure tied to their mortality which continually entreats me though I cannot take it away. It is by means of this bare expression of an exposure to death as the core of language that it will become possible for non-human mortal beings to have what Levinas calls language. This possibility, although not explicitly addressed by Levinas, is at least left open by his account of Bobby the dog as well as his agnosticism over a snake’s face.

In this paper, I explain how anthropocentrism expresses itself in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and show how it also leaves openings for ecological concerns to seep in. This is done by analyzing Levinas's concept of the Other and its relation to the third to show that the Other is understood as not only the one to whom I am responsible but also a responsible being in their own right who can question me. This establishes the Other as one who must have the capacity for responsibility, a capacity given only to humans by Levinas. This constriction is problematized, however, by the fact that the “human,” for Levinas, is not necessarily coextensive with biological humans thus opening the door for applying the term “human” to other beings that could display a capacity for responsibility thereby expanding the realm of ethics beyond biological humans.

In the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the emphasis on the human is what allowed him to maintain a concept of fraternity limited to only one set of beings, thus allowing for an appropriable exteriority to form that could sustain this set of beings. In a worldview in which the set of beings of moral concern is opened up to include nonhumans in a non-determinate way, there is no consistently defined appropriable exteriority posited. This is the point at which the question of justifying the appropriation of other "persons" presents itself since, in such a context, there can be no appropriation which is not potentially that of another "person" since "persons" are not defined in a stable way in...

This paper adds to the critical work on the relationship between Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Levinas by arguing that the experience of the face of the other can be made compatible with Jonas’s understanding of metabolism thus allowing for an extension of who counts as an other to include all organic life forms. Although this extension will allow for a broadening of ethical patients on one side, we will see that a corresponding broadening of ethical agents on the other side will prove to be more difficult owing to the exceptionality of the human being that they both maintain and believe is expressed through the experience of responsibility.