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What do my end-of-semester books tell me? I always ask.
I’ve been thinking for the past handful-plus years about how to translate Levinas’ work – which is so critically entrenched in the European experience – into the experience of the Americas – which is so critically disengaged from the European experience. This engagement/disengagement is hardly a firm limit. On the one hand, Levinas’ conception of the Other is so obviously indebted to the trajectory of European history, which he (not unproblematically) calls ‘the Bible and the Greeks.’ This debt is on display in his sense of critique (strategy) and exemplary historical cases (content). On the other hand, there is surely a case to be made for a general structure of transcendence to which we can attribute explanatory force, even if that force is, in the end, abut how such an explanation breaks apart. Read the rest of this entry »
