Mérédith Laferté-Coutu

This paper is about the ambivalence of land relations, specifically what way of taking root enables rather than forecloses an ethical relation to the land and other people, including strangers. Turning to Levinas and Glissant’s critiques of rootedness, and specifically rootedness in territory or soil, I examine their respective accounts of origins and creation. In Levinas, I pay special attention to the tension that arises between Levinas’s account of a home without roots or land, separate from the elements, and his own account of the concrete conditions for hospitality, including shelter, food, and clothes. In Glissant, I focus on the difference between land and territory, and the different roles of the sacred, ritual, and literature in either case. I propose to read Levinas through this distinction, to resolve part of the tension surrounding hospitality: rootedness in territory excludes the other; rootedness in the land—in an aesthetic and cultural sense, not just a material and economic one—is a condition of possibility for hospitality.

This article explores the seemingly exaggerated emphasis of Lyotard on the importance of hearing the ethical commandment in Levinas, instead of seeing or perceiving it in sensibility. Lyotard wants to read Levinas as a “Jewish thinker,” and his ethics as deeply connected to “Hebraic ethics.” Such a reading contrasts with phenomenological and Christian interpretations of Levinas, like Jean-Luc Marion’s, that focus on incarnation, the face, love, and the concrete relation to the other. Yet Lyotard outbids the rigor of commandment in Levinas, insisting on the radical heterogeneity of hearing and any phenomenological seeing. Ethics is completely outside phenomenology. This article argues that, instead of reading Lyotard as misreading Levinas, his approach can be one of the names for the skeptical phase that suspends or interrupts the Levinasian Said itself, especially when it tends to become excessively Christian.

The phenomenological notion of attitude has gained new traction in recent years, as it proliferates beyond its initial distinction between natural and phenomenological attitudes, notably to describe multiple meanings to critique and reflection. In this paper, I present an account of the concept of an ethical attitude in Husserlian phenomenology. First, I argue that the ethical attitude is best understood as a practical orientation toward personal life as a whole: someone strives to become the best possible person through self-reflection, self-variation, the renewal of values and ends, and resolve. Second, I interpret Husserl’s accounts of the ethical reduction and the practical neutrality modification through the notion of the ethical attitude. This allows me to elaborate on questions of motivation for striving to be a good person, even if the world seems inhospitable to that effort. The question of the motivation for the ethical attitude reveals that Husserl grappled with existential and theological issues, including the valuelessness of existence, the problem of contingency, and the idea of God. Ultimately, interpreting Husserl’s ethical writings through the notion of the ethical attitude brings together several aspects of his ethics, thereby clarifying the many senses of critique and reflection at play in ethical and social life.

Since Gayle Salamon’s 2018 article “What is Critical about Critical Phenomenology?”, phenomenologists and critical theorists have offered various responses to the question this title poses. In doing this, they articulated the following considerations: is renewed criticality targeting the phenomenological method itself, does it expand its subject matter to marginalized experiences, does it retool key phenomenological concepts? One aspect of this debate that has been left under-interrogated, however, is the word “phenomenology” itself. There is after all another question to ask in this context: what is phenomenological about critical phenomenology? Many avenues of response are of course possible. Phenomenology could most broadly be meant as an approach that concerns itself with what is given in experience in order to describe the structures of that givenness. From a Husserlian perspective, pure phenomenology is the science which concerns itself with phenomena in the full and diverse sense of the word—not as understood by specific natural or human sciences. What is distinctive of phenomenology is thus not what subset or type of phenomena it is interested in but how it relates to them, which, as Husserl introduces Ideas I, happens “in a completely different attitude.”

What can the passage of time mean for Levinas? Is there a passage of diachronic time? In its many iterations, passage—an expression that easily goes unnoticed, for it is ordinary, perhaps self-evident, yet almost pervasive in the French language—turns out to be at play throughout Levinas’s last major work. This paper traces the role of the notion in Otherwise than Being and shows its stakes for the remarkably numerous topics that it connects: Levinas’s critique of Husserlian temporality, the relation between the Infinite and the finite, as well as, most generally, justice and the ethical relation itself. Specifically, because the equivocal expression “se passer ” means both passing and happening, diachronic time not only passes but happens.