Levinas and Asian Thought

Contents

CONTENTS Abbreviations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Leah Kalmanson and Sarah Mattice I. Selves and Others 1 • Facing (“and Yet Not Facing”) East: Reorienting Levinas toward the Buddhist No-Self 13 Frank Garrett 2 • Desire and the Possibility of Escape: Levinas and the Buddha on the Nature and Value of Desire 27 Drew M. Dalton 3 • The Legalist Betrayal of the Confucian Other: Sima Qian’s Portrait of the First Qin Emperor 41 Steven Shankman 4 • The Space between Us: Embodiment and Intersubjectivity in Watsuji and Levinas 53 Joel Krueger II. Responsibility and Its Limits 5 • On Debts, Duties, and Dialogue: The Vedas and Levinas on the Ethical Metaphysics of Hospitality 81 Arindam Chakrabarti 6 • The Complicity of the Ethical: Causality, Karma, and Violence in Buddhism and Levinas 99 Eric S. Nelson 7 • Acting toward the Other with/out Violence 115 Dan Lusthaus vi Contents 8 • The Hidden Hour: Thinking Levinas through Bushidō 131 Andy Amato III. Practices, Norms, and Institutions 9 • Cambodia, 2009 147 Alphonso Lingis 10 • Dialectics of the Unseen: Levinas and an Islamic Ethics of the Other 167 M. Ashraf Adeel 11 • Absolute Otherness and the Taste of Powdered Green Tea 181 Matthew Coate 12 • Vitality as Responsivity: Levinas and Lao-Zhuang Daoism 195 Bradley Douglas Park 13 • The Flow of the Breath: Levinas Mouth-to-Mouth with Buddhism 225 Mitchell Verter Notes 241 Bibliography 267 About the Contributors 283 Index 287 ...