ASRC 3125

The Unethical Levinas

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

Immanuel Levinas is known as a thinker whose work turns on the relation to the other. Specifically, Levinas is synonymous with the concept of the face-to-face. That is, in a Levinasian word, if I look on the face of the other I am much less likely to do violence to the other. This course, taking its cue from Levinas' "Difficult Freedom," demonstrates the circumscription of that Levinasian concept. The particular universal, this course will show, is limited by Levinas, in the moment of philosophical truth, to those whom he assigns the designation "particular universal." This course will account for why it is Levinas' other is a figure circumscribed by identitarian proclivities. As such, it will ask why it is Levinas excludes those whom he excludes, and, most importantly, how what raises a particular set of difficulties in relation to Levinas as renowned thinker of the ethical.

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