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In a 1982 radio interview with Emmanuel Levinas and Alain Finkielkraut, Shlomo Malka refers to Levinas as the “philosopher of the ‘other.’”1 This designation accurately describes Levinas and his philosophical project, which focuses on responsibility to the other. Levinas’s philosophy demonstrates a radical shift in the portrayal of the other. We can see in the French existential tradition, and more generally in modernity, the portrayal of the other as a threat to one’s subjectivity and freedom—indeed, a threat to everything that one may have and want. Instead of viewing the other as occupying a lower status in the zero-sum “fight” for subjectivity, Levinas views the other as having priority in the relationship between the ‘I’ and the Other. In Levinas’s view, in fact, the response to the other founds subjectivity . The other not only does not threaten my subjectivity, but is also necessary for my subjectivity. This shift in thinking alters not only the status of the other, but the relationship between an ‘I’ and an Other. It also reveals that we are not the isolated, independent atoms that are described in much of the history of Western philosophy. Rather, we are always already connected to the other through our ethical obligation to the other.2 The traditional understanding of ‘the other,’ particularly in the Western philosophical tradition, further complicates how we view the status of the feminine throughout Levinas’s project. Since Levinas gives priority to ethics over ontology, the position of the other as an ethical other grants it a privileged status. Therefore, the feminine, insofar as it occupies the position of the other, also occupies a privileged position. This does not mean that the feminine is an unproblematic term in Levinas’s writing. Quite to the contrary, what he means by the other, and even the feminine, is often not clear. The common understanding of the other in Levinas’s writings is as an ethical other, the other to whom I am responsible. In Time and the Other, a long essay published in the 1940s, Levinas had not yet named the ethical Introduction  relationship. But in this essay he defined the feminine not only as the Other, but also as the absolutely other. In his first major book, Totality and Infinity—published in the 1960s—the ethical relationship, now named, excluded the feminine. The feminine appeared to play a transcendental role, providing the conditions that make the ethical relationship possible, while not participating in the ethical relationship itself. The status of the feminine and its relationship to the ethical in these two early writings is already at issue. And from the questionable status of the feminine emerge several other problems. Due in part to the way that Levinas uses his terms, there is first a problem identifying the relation that the feminine has to the ethical. The ‘other’ connected to the definition of my subjectivity is conflated with the ‘other’ who is the feminine—the other who sits on the margins of a system, the other who, according to Time and the Other, will make the ethical possible via the experience of alterity, and who, according to the argument in Totality and Infinity, provides the means by which the ethical can occur. One cannot simply assume that the feminine is part of the ethical relation, at least not in his writings prior to Otherwise than Being. In no event can one assume it unproblematically. He regularly conflates the two conceptions of ‘other’ at work in his discussion. Second, Levinas’s use of the feminine to mark stereotypically feminine traits—for example, hospitality, generosity, welcoming—leads one to conclude that the feminine functions as something more than a metaphor, and the scholarly debate over this term centers on whether it also refers to concrete women. Additionally, Levinas often vacillates in several of his writings between using “le féminin” and “la femme,” further complicating its referent .3 In both Totality and Infinity and “Judaism and the Feminine,” for example , he interchanges “le féminin” and “la femme.” Additionally, in “Judaism and the Feminine,” he lists several attributes that he calls feminine, but then he specifically names female figures in the Hebrew Bible as people who exemplify those traits. Whether the feminine functions simply as a metaphor, referring to the stereotypical feminine traits that may be shared by all people, or whether it refers to empirical women is unclear. If the feminine refers to concrete women, then does this mean that women are...

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