Levinas’s Diachronic Thought: The Ethics of Deformalized Time Restricted; Files Only
Andrade, Bernardo (Summer 2024)
Abstract
This dissertation reads Levinas’s theory of time as prolegomena to any future ethics of alterity. For an ethics of alterity to be possible, two mutually opposing conditions must obtain. On the one hand, ethical laws must proceed from a fully heteronomous source which absolves itself from any conceptual mediation. On the other hand, such laws must acquire meaning within the mental economy of an ego for whom everything is conceptually mediated. Levinas’s goal is, accordingly, to investigate the meaning of what lies beyond meaning. He wants to allow for something beyond meaning to acquire a foothold within meaning, yet without divesting itself of its alterity. Diachrony, I contend, is what makes this possible. The upshot of my argument is that diachronic time names the genesis, or the constitution, of the meaning of radical alterity.
Starting with the problem of the meaning of alterity in Levinas, the dissertation then proceeds to respond to this problem through diachrony, in both its formal and non-formal aspects. At its most formal level, diachrony names the time-lapse between what produces sense and the presence in which sense is rendered. The time of presence, the time in which things appear, is conditioned by other temporal orders that do not reduce to it—a past that was never present, and a future that will never be present. This formal structure is subsequently deformalized or concretized through a series of phenomenological analyses that span the entirety of Levinas’s career (the caress, fecundity, forgiveness, and responsibility). A result of this study is a view of Levinas’s overall method as a progressive movement from ‘formalization’ to ‘deformalization.’
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Aporia of Separation
Chapter 2: The Life of Separation
Chapter 3: The Promise of Time
Chapter 4: The Deformalization of Time
Chapter 5: The Anteriority of Ethics
Conclusion
Bibliography
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File download under embargo until 21 August 2030 | 2024-06-23 22:35:11 -0400 | File download under embargo until 21 August 2030 |
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