Time, Death, and the Feminine : Levinas with Heidegger / Tina Chanter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chanter, Tina, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (320 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Examining Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas’s thought. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the ecstases (past, present, and future) of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. The author suggests that though Levinas’s conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger’s philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas’s philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Acknowledgments

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter one. Ontological Difference, Sexual Difference, and Time

Chapter two. Heidegger and Feminism: Bodies, Others, Temporality

Chapter three. Heidegger’s Critique of Metaphysical Presence

Chapter four. The Temporality of Saying: Politics Beyond the Ontological Difference

Chapter five. Giving Time and Death: Levinas, Heidegger, and the Trauma of the Gift

Chapter six. Impossible Possibility: Thinking Ethics After Levinas with Rosenzweig and Heidegger in the Wake of the Shoah

Chapter seven. A Mourning of Philosophy: Levinas’s Legacy as Traumatic Response

Chapter eight. The Betrayal of Philosophy

Conclusion: The Lapse of Time and the Feminine

Notes

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-1882-X