Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law

Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law
Author: Desmond Manderson
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2006
Genre: Law
ISBN: 077353041X

The relationship between tort law jurisprudence and the ethics and phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas.

Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law

Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law
Author: Desmond Manderson
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2006-05-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0773575650

Without compromising the integrity of either Levinas' poetic evocations of our spirit or the law's dense descriptions of our society, Manderson brings the two into constructive dialogue. For the student of Levinas, the author offers an understanding of the implications and difficulties involved in applying ethics to law - major issues in continental philosophy. For the student of law, he provides a powerful framework through which to reconceptualize duty of care, the law of negligence, and the nature of legal judgment itself - major issues in legal theory.

Levinas, Ethics and Law

Levinas, Ethics and Law
Author: Stone Matthew Stone
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2016-07-07
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1474415148

Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ethics has frequently attracted attention amongst legal scholars, but he remains a divisive and often enigmatic contributor to this field. He has been read within contexts as varied as human rights, private law, refugee law, and on the nature of judicial reasoning. This book explores what unites such apparently diverse applications of his ideas, and in doing so considers the challenge of law's ethical relationship with the other. In addition to asking how Levinas's ethics can inform legal problems, the book also examines how the modern legal edifice has a deceptive tendency to close itself off from the ethical experience. In particular, literatures on biopolitics suggest that law is increasingly complicit in reductive determinations of how we understand ourselves and others. Levinas's most penetrating insight might not, therefore, lie in the law's instrumentalisation of his ethics, but instead in the way his ethics trace a human encounter that escapes law.

Essays on Levinas and Law

Essays on Levinas and Law
Author: Desmond Manderson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2008-12-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0230234739

This collection brings together major writers and major works on what Emmanuel Levinas means to law, and injects Levinas' provocative ethics right into the heart of living law, radically changing our understanding of both.

Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law

Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law
Author: Desmond Manderson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0415529514

Annotation This volume addresses the legacy of contemporary critiques of language for the concept of the rule of law. Can the rule of law be re-configured in light of the critical turn of the past several years in legal theory, rather than being steadfastly opposed to it?

The Oxford Handbook of Levinas

The Oxford Handbook of Levinas
Author: Michael L. Morgan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 881
Release: 2019-04-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190910682

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers.

To Make the Hands Impure

To Make the Hands Impure
Author: Adam Zachary Newton
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823273318

How can cradling, handling, or rubbing a text be said, ethically, to have made something happen? What, as readers or interpreters, may come off in our hands in as we maculate or mark the books we read? For Adam Zachary Newton, reading is anembodied practice wherein “ethics” becomes a matter of tact—in the doubled sense of touch and regard. With the image of the book lying in the hands of its readers as insistent refrain, To Make the Hands Impure cuts a provocative cross-disciplinary swath through classical Jewish texts, modern Jewish philosophy, film and performance, literature, translation, and the material text. Newton explores the ethics of reading through a range of texts, from the Talmud and Midrash to Conrad’s Nostromo and Pascal’s Le Mémorial, from works by Henry Darger and Martin Scorsese to the National September 11 Memorial and a synagogue in Havana, Cuba. In separate chapters, he conducts masterly treatments of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stanley Cavell by emphasizing their performances as readers—a trebled orientation to Talmud, novel, and theater/film. To Make the Hands Impure stages the encounter of literary experience and scriptural traditions—the difficult and the holy—through an ambitious, singular, and innovative approach marked in equal measure by erudition and imaginative daring.

Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life

Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life
Author: Tom Frost
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 135175209X

This first book-length study into the influence of Emmanuel Levinas on the thought and philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life, demonstrates how Agamben’s immanent thought can be read as presenting a compelling, albeit flawed, alternative to Levinas’s ethics of the Other. The publication of the English translation of The Use of Bodies in 2016 ended Giorgio Agamben’s 20-year multi-volume Homo Sacer study. Over this time, Agamben’s thought has greatly influenced scholarship in law, the wider humanities and social sciences. This book places Agamben’s figure of form-of-life in relation to Levinasian understandings of alterity, relationality and the law. Considering how Agamben and Levinas craft their respective forms of embodied existence – that is, a fully-formed human that can live an ethical life – the book considers Agamben’s attempt to move beyond Levinasian ethics through the liminal figures of the foetus and the patient in a persistent vegetative state. These figures, which Agamben uses as examples of bare life, call into question the limits of Agamben’s non-relational use and form of existence. As such, it is argued, they reveal the limitations of Agamben’s own ethics, whilst suggesting that his ‘abandoned’ project can and must be taken further. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, graduate students and anyone with an interest in the thought of Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Levinas in the fields of law, philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences.

New Critical Legal Thinking

New Critical Legal Thinking
Author: Matthew Stone
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2012-10-12
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1136291202

New Critical Legal Thinking articulates the emergence of a stream of critical legal theory which is directly concerned with the relation between law and the political. The early critical legal studies claim that all law is politics is displaced with a different and more nuanced theoretical arsenal. Combining grand theory with a concern for grounded political interventions, the various contributors to this book draw on political theorists and continental philosophers in order to engage with current legal problematics, such as the recent global economic crisis, the Arab spring and the emergence of biopolitics. The contributions instantiate the claim that a new and radical political legal scholarship has come into being: one which critically interrogates and intervenes in the contemporary relationship between law and power.

Levinas, Messianism and Parody

Levinas, Messianism and Parody
Author: Terence Holden
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2011-09-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1441119345

There is no greater testament to Emmanuel Levinas' reputation as an enigmatic thinker than in his meditations on eschatology and its relevance for contemporary thought. Levinas has come to be seen as a principal representative in Continental philosophy - alongside the likes of Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno and Zizek - of a certain philosophical messianism, differing from its religious counterpart in being formulated apparently without appeal to any dogmatic content. To date, however, Levinas' messianism has not received the same detailed attention as other aspects of his wide ranging ethical vision. Terence Holden attempts to redress this imbalance, tracing the evolution of the messianic idea across Levinas' career, emphasising the transformations or indeed displacements which this idea undergoes in taking on philosophical intelligibility. He suggests that, in order to crack the enigma which this idea represents, we must consider not only the Jewish tradition from which Levinas draws inspiration, but also Nietzsche, who ostensibly would represent the greatest rival to the messianic idea in the history of philosophy, with his notion of the 'parody' of messianism.