Project MUSE®: Levinas Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Levinas Studies.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 6 (2011) through current issueLatest Articles: Levinas StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Levinas Studies2153-84331554-7000Latest articles in Levinas Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Thinking Relation: Glissant and Levinas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986335
<p></p>
Glissant and Levinas lived in Paris at the same time from 1946–1965. Glissant moved from Martinique to Paris in 1946 and began his doctorate at the Sorbonne. In the following years he went on to publish his first book of essays Soleil de la Conscience (1956), his first novel La lézarde (1958), his first play Monsieur Toussaint (1961), and numerous books of poetry.1 In 1959 he and Paul Niger formed the Front antillo-guyanais pour l'autonomie, which resulted in Charles de Gaulle preventing him from returning to Martinique until 1965. After Levinas was freed from a Nazi Prisoners of War camp in 1945, he became director of the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale in Paris. In the following years, he published major works
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535/image/coversmallThinking Relation: Glissant and Levinas2026-03-26text/htmlen-USThinking Relation: Glissant and Levinas2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®166222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26The Unique and the Exotic: Segalen, Levinas, Glissant
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986336
<p></p>
"I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self."In Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity Édouard Glissant identified what he called the major question confronting the contemporary world, a question that he suggested had been imposed on us by creolization. He asked, "how one can be oneself without closing oneself off to the other, and how can one open oneself to the other without losing oneself."1 The question arose in the context of one of his attacks on the idea that "every identity is an identity that is at root unique and exclusive of others."2 Glissant used this question, a question that frustrates familiar forms of thought, to advocate for what he called "a
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535/image/coversmallThe Unique and the Exotic: Segalen, Levinas, Glissant2026-03-26text/htmlen-USThe Unique and the Exotic: Segalen, Levinas, Glissant2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1199602026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Thinking the Time and Memory of Relation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986337
<p></p>
The reflections that follow are remarks on the exhaustion and obligations of giving everlasting names. The name makes identity. Naming and being named now is how time affects and makes its history and memory known on the body. Naming preserves memory between bodies—obligating us in site—while looping that memory into the future. The name is fecund that way, bearing within it important crossings of time and the existential citation of our ethical bearing on one another. We will return to this motif often."I will give them an everlasting name." This is how Claude Lanzmann begins his massively important film Shoah with a citation of Isaiah 56:5. The context of this citation is important, locating the acting naming and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535/image/coversmallThinking the Time and Memory of Relation2026-03-26text/htmlen-USThinking the Time and Memory of Relation2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®663202026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Fleshing Out Relation: Alterity, Opacity, and Landed Reciprocity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986338
<p></p>
The conceptual question of Relation/non-Relation in Levinas's account of ethical responsibility brought me to his work a long time ago. That is to say, the centrality in Levinas's phenomenological account of the ego's proximity (an iteration of Relation) to the Other for questions of ontological freedom and meaning-making was formative to my own development as a young philosopher. What his work has to say about structures of subjectivity, how those structures already include a proximity to a 'present absence' alterity—a Relation to an ethically-meaningful absence—has always helped me theorize my own experience of feeling disrupted in myself. What I also continue to find compelling about Levinas's conception of the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535/image/coversmallFleshing Out Relation: Alterity, Opacity, and Landed Reciprocity2026-03-26text/htmlen-USFleshing Out Relation: Alterity, Opacity, and Landed Reciprocity2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®655772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Heidegger, Levinas, and Glissant: The Problem of Dwelling
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986339
<p></p>
To understand the debate between Heidegger and Levinas and the stakes of this argument it is important to turn to the histories in which both thinkers are situated. I understand Heidegger's conception of dwelling as rooted in ethnonationalism. Furthermore, I take Levinas' accusation of Paganism seriously in this account of dwelling. In no way do I seek to claim that Heidegger was a secret Pagan, but understanding where precisely Levinas sees what he calls Paganism can provide us with a useful framework for understanding both Heidegger's and Levinas' commitments and the political alignments that stem from them.Although there is much scholarly debate over when to locate the exact moment of Heidegger's Kehre, I would
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535/image/coversmallHeidegger, Levinas, and Glissant: The Problem of Dwelling2026-03-26text/htmlen-USHeidegger, Levinas, and Glissant: The Problem of Dwelling2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1081932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26(No) Return: Between Levinas's and Glissant's Critiques of Rootedness
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986340
<p></p>
Emmanuel Levinas and Édouard Glissant grapple with the challenges of finding a land called "home" for different reasons, reflected in their respective biographies and historical and cultural contexts. They both leave their countries of origin, Lithuania and Martinique, to live and study in France. However, such departures were differently motivated. For Glissant, leaving for Paris in 1946 to pursue his Ph.D. was a detour meant for a better return to Martinique. This illustrates what he calls "the necessity of detour in Antillean thought" and the related necessity of beginning with an uprooting to "clarify the problem of the relation to the land" in the Caribbean.1 Moreover, when Glissant founded the Front
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535/image/coversmall(No) Return: Between Levinas's and Glissant's Critiques of Rootedness2026-03-26text/htmlen-US(No) Return: Between Levinas's and Glissant's Critiques of Rootedness2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1245962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Anarchism, the Shock from Elsewhere, Glissant and Levinas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986341
<p></p>
"Those who are too early are not on time either."Anarchism has always been a name haunted by its own imaginary, an aspiration running against countervailing appeals to a reality or a nightmare that would be said to expose its dreamlike futility. That the imaginary is integral to anarchism is apparent from one of its most cogent definitions in Kropotkin's 1910 article for the Encyclopedia Britannica:ANARCHISM (from the Gr. ἀν, and ἀϱχἠ, contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government—harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535/image/coversmallAnarchism, the Shock from Elsewhere, Glissant and Levinas2026-03-26text/htmlen-USAnarchism, the Shock from Elsewhere, Glissant and Levinas2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®2766452026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Levinas's Exegesis and Interpretation of Great Literary Works: Homer's Iliad and Dante's Divine Comedy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986342
<p></p>
Emmanuel Levinas often looked back fondly on the student years he spent at the Kharkiv Lyceum in the dying days of the Russian Empire. His explorations of the world of thought in this period were largely mediated through classical literature, more specifically the dramas of Shakespeare and the classic works of Russian literature by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Levinas associated the immersion in national literature with the awakening of his adolescent thinking mind, and he saw his passion for literature as the best preparation for his later analyses of philosophical texts, both in terms of developing his linguistic and imaginative skills but also through the relational perspective which it offered.
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535/image/coversmallLevinas's Exegesis and Interpretation of Great Literary Works: Homer's Iliad and Dante's Divine Comedy2026-03-26text/htmlen-USLevinas's Exegesis and Interpretation of Great Literary Works: Homer's Iliad and Dante's Divine Comedy2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®965492026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Stepping Around, Across, and On the Trauma of the Holocaust: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the Holocaust in Lithuania
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343
<p></p>
The importance of Levinas's ethical philosophy across many disciplines is now indisputable. Levinas at this point almost has to be regarded as the most important religious philosopher of our time and certainly among the few most important philosophers of the past generation. I would also argue that Levinas is at the same time also the most important specifically and thoroughly post-Holocaust philosopher the twentieth century produced.Now to say that Levinas is specifically a post-Holocaust philosopher and that his philosophical work is both affected by and a response to the Nazi genocide against the many Jewish communities of Europe is to say something few people who write on Levinas would argue against. Maurice
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986343">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/535/image/coversmallStepping Around, Across, and On the Trauma of the Holocaust: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the Holocaust in Lithuania2026-03-26text/htmlen-USStepping Around, Across, and On the Trauma of the Holocaust: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the Holocaust in Lithuania2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®699352026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26