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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ida DjursaaORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Taking a feminist critical approach, this paper employs Levinas’s thinking on sensibility and time in Otherwise than being to develop a concept of the body as an original intercorporeality through the fact of having been born which, I argue, provides material depth to his critique of the sovereign subject. Contra Guenther’s (2006) development of a maternal ethics based on Levinas’s assertion that the ethical relation of substitution is “like a maternal body,” I argue that modeling a Levinasian conception of ethics upon the maternal body risks perpetuating normative ideas surrounding motherhood and reproduction. Yet I argue that, apart from a Levinasian conception of ethics, the notion of substitution evokes the situation of pregnancy in which the mother breathes for the fetus. Finally, I conceptualize Levinas’s notion of the oneself as descriptive of all (human) bodies which retain a trace from the body from which they were born. Reading Levinas and Irigaray (2017) together, I argue that the notion of the oneself marks a move from the abstract concept of the subject to the concrete notion of the body as an original intercorporeality whose capacity to breathe autonomously rests upon an immemorial “inspiration” by the body from which it was born.
Author(s): Djursaa I
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
Year: 2025
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 20/06/2025
Acceptance date: 16/01/2025
Date deposited: 11/07/2025
ISSN (print): 0887-5367
ISSN (electronic): 1527-2001
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2025.10
DOI: 10.1017/hyp.2025.10
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