A narrow belt: The personal, the pragmatic, and the poetic in the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas

This dissertation centers on Emmanuel Levinas's account of ethical subjectivity in order to expose the minimalism of his ethics. I set aside the themes typically associated with Levinas, instead focusing on his imagery and places where his texts break with traditional philosophical language. Examining the kind of phenomenology Levinas simultaneously critiques and practices, I argue for a link between Levinas's phenomenology and William James's radical empiricism by following his account of the non-intentionality definitive of sensibility and the face-to-face. The last two chapters confront a tension between philosophy and art and the difficulties this raises for Levinasian ethics. I conclude with the idea of "poetic certainty" in relation to Levinas's ethics and offer a visual analog to Levinas's il y a in the work of the American painter Philip Guston. Throughout I have used sources outside the usual cannon of Levinas scholarship. Linking Levinas with William James widens the scope of Levinas's influence and our resources for engaging and critiquing him. I show that the means for getting beyond Levinas are there in Levinas himself---in texts riddled with gestures toward Pragmatism, Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis. These gestures pave the way for a more expansive, open and pragmatic version of phenomenology, a more realistic account of ethics, and the de-centering of philosophical fields of inquiry that hold each other at arms length.