Levinas on the Problem of Language: Expressing the Inexpressible

Large, William ORCID: 0000-0003-0447-5364 (2019) Levinas on the Problem of Language: Expressing the Inexpressible. In: The Oxford Handbook of Levinas. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 749-767. ISBN 9780190455934

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the problem of language in Levinas’s philosophy regarding methodology. Ethics, for Levinas, happens in everyday speech, where the Other demands a response from me. How he describes this relation presents methodological problems for Levinas, because it is resistant to any kind of theoretical approach, including phenomenology. Any writing about ethics, including Levinas’s, would immediately be its betrayal. This chapter describes Levinas’s account of language in Totality and Infinity, the issues that remain there, which it highlights through Blanchot’s and Derrida’s discussion of Levinas’s work. It also outlines a different way of thinking about the alterity of Other that is suggested in Totality and Infinity but comes to the fore in Otherwise Than Being, which is not as an opposition between speech and the visible, but enunciation (the saying) and the sayable (the said).

Item Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	Chapter 36
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Alterity; Blanchot; Derrida; Language; Levinas; Phenomenology; Speech; REF2021
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BS The Bible
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > School of Creative Arts
Research Priority Areas:	Culture, Continuity, and Transformation
Depositing User:	Susan Turner
Date Deposited:	27 Nov 2020 11:28
Last Modified:	31 Aug 2023 08:54
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/9042

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