Scott Davidson

The phenomenology of life is the best available path for phenomenology today. Through new readings of two of the most influential French thinkers of the twentieth century-Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur, Pathos and Praxis: An Integrated Phenomenology of Life shows that their actual debates over the interpretation of Freud and Marx signal two rival approaches to the phenomenology of life. While Henry reveals the phenomenological meaning of life though an inward turn to a pure subjective feeling of being alive, Ricoeur anchors its significance in the reciprocal interaction between the self and the world. But these two alternatives are not necessarily opposed. This book proposes an integrated phenomenology of life to which each thinker makes an important contribution. To be a self is to suffer the pathos of "having a life" but also to be capable of engaging in the praxis of "leading a life." By thinking the pathos and praxis of life together, the integrated approach preserves human agency against deterministic conceptions of life and at the same time avoids the meritocratic hubris that depicts one's life solely as the result of one's own doing. This integration of having and leading a life reframes our thinking about human capabilities and vulnerabilities in a way that has important implications for biopolitics and the ethics of life.

Levinas's defense of ethical subjectivity provides a fruitful alternative to the accounts of subjectivity offered by either modernism or post-modernism. The modern conception of the subject, on the one hand, promotes the autonomy of the subject, but it neglects the importance of the social, cultural, and economic conditions in which the subject is formed. The post-modern conception of the subject, on the other hand, acknowledges the conditioning influence of the concrete world, but in so doing, it runs the risk of annulling the possibility of ethical responsibility. Can the subject be de-centered but yet retain a sense of agency necessary for ethics? Levinas's account of ethical subjectivity solves this problem by showing that the subject is at once de-centered and ethically responsible. Here ethical responsibility is a heteronomy which emerges in the relation to the other person. I show that the other person both de-centers the subject by calling its freedom into the question and holds the subject accountable for its freedom by provoking a reflection on freedom.

ABSTRACT In his published work, Levinas only mentions metaphor for the sake of dismissing its relevance to his ethics of transcendence. Metaphor is aligned with the poetic imagery and the rhetorical devices that weave together an ontology of immanence, whereas transcendence is said to occur through an immediate encounter with the other. But Levinas's unpublished lecture “La Métaphore” is of interest precisely because it troubles this distinction through the notion of a “metaphorical transcendence.” Although Levinas abandons this terminology after his lecture, this article suggests that an implicit, but unavowed, operation of metaphor persists in the guise of his ethics of substitution.

The legacy of Husserlian phenomenology in France, as Paul Ricœur observes, has inspired a series of “Husserlian heresies.” This paper seeks to shedlight on the Husserl heretics through a study of two influential thinkers who introduced Husserl’s to French readers: Levinas and Ricoeur. Their introductionsgave rise to the “standard picture” of Husserl as an Idealist. Their criticism of Husserl’s Idealism then provides the springboard into their own originalthought. What ultimately emerges from this, however, are two different visions of how phenomenology should relate to its own limits.

More than fifteen years have now passed since the publication of Dominique Janicaud’s book Phenomenology “Wide Open” —the sequel to his controversial essay published in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn.”1 There, as is widely known, Janicaud raised the question of whether the phenomenological enterprises of figures such as Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, and Jean-Luc Marion were marked by a “theological turn” and, if so, whether such a turn was phenomenologically warranted. At this point, a voluminous literature over this debate exists, much of it defending the accused against those charges.2 Perhaps as an indirect result of that focus, there has been relatively little discussion of..