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Levinas and the Time of Sensibility: A Material Transcendence?

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ida Djursaa

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Abstract

Critically tracing the genealogy of the notion of transcendence in Levinas's oeuvre, this paper challenges the standard conception according to which this central Levinasian notion designates what is inherently immaterial. I emphasise the importance of the early formulation, from the 1930s and 40s, of transcendence as the need to escape materiality and the body to better understand Levinas's later insistence, in Totality and Infinity, upon an absolute transcendence. Through a critical engagement with this work, I develop the notion of a "non-assimilative sensibility" as the modality of the "experience" of the face. Whilst emphasising fecundity as the concretisation of transcendence in Totality and Infinity, I argue, however, that it is not until "substitution" that Levinas finds his resolution to the need for escape, as the synchronic alterity of the face and the diachronic alterity of fecundity merge in the sensible materiality of the body itself. We shall thus trace the way in which the notion of an infinite or absolute transcendence, as if despite Levinas's own intentions, transcends itself, and in the end returns to the immanence or the basic materiality of the sensible body.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Djursaa I

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Études Phénoménologiques - Phenomenological Studies

Year: 2023

Volume: 7

Pages: 101-123

Print publication date: 31/01/2023

Acceptance date: 28/01/2022

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

URL: https://doi.org/10.2143/EPH.7.0.3291056

DOI: 10.2143/EPH.7.0.3291056

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