Proper Names (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) - Softcover

Levinas, Emmanuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804723524 ISBN 13: 9780804723527

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Combining elements from Heidegger’s philosophy of “being-in-the-world” and the tradition of Jewish theology, Levinas has evolved a new type of ethics based on a concept of “the Other” in two different but complementary aspects. He describes his encounters with those philosophers and literary authors (most of them his contemporaries) whose writings have most significantly contributed to the construction of his own philosophy of “Otherness”: Agnon, Buber, Celan, Delhomme, Derrida, Jabès, Kierkegaard, Lacroix, Laporte, Picard, Proust, Van Breda, Wahl, and, most notably, Blanchot.

At the same time, Levinas’s own texts are inscriptions and documents of those encounters with “Others” around which his philosophy is turning. Thus the texts simultaneously convey an immediate experience of how his intellectual position emerged and how it is put into practice. A third potential function of the book is that it unfolds the network of references and persons in philosophical debates since Kierkegaard.

About this title

About the Author

Emmanuel Levinas is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. Among his many books is Outside the Subject (Stanford, 1994).

From the Back Cover

“Perhaps the names of persons whose saying signifies a face—proper names in the middle of all these common names and commonplaces—can resist the dissolution of meaning and help us to speak.” —From the author’s Foreword

From the Inside Flap

Combining elements from Heidegger’s philosophy of “being-in-the-world” and the tradition of Jewish theology, Levinas has evolved a new type of ethics based on a concept of “the Other” in two different but complementary aspects. He describes his encounters with those philosophers and literary authors (most of them his contemporaries) whose writings have most significantly contributed to the construction of his own philosophy of “Otherness”: Agnon, Buber, Celan, Delhomme, Derrida, Jabès, Kierkegaard, Lacroix, Laporte, Picard, Proust, Van Breda, Wahl, and, most notably, Blanchot.
At the same time, Levinas’s own texts are inscriptions and documents of those encounters with “Others” around which his philosophy is turning. Thus the texts simultaneously convey an immediate experience of how his intellectual position emerged and how it is put into practice. A third potential function of the book is that it unfolds the network of references and persons in philosophical debates since Kierkegaard.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804723524
• ISBN 13: 9780804723527
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208