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"Like a Maternal Body": Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses
- Hypatia
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 21, Number 1, Winter 2006
- pp. 119-136
- 10.1353/hyp.2005.0140
- Article
- Additional Information
Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a "wet nurse" bearing Others whom he has "neither conceived nor given birth to" (Num. 11:12). A close reading of this passage raises questions about ethics, maternity, and sexual difference, for both the concept of ethical substitution and the material practice of mothering.