| My central task in this dissertation is to explore the implications of Emmanuel Levinas's ethics for a radical political praxis. Toward this end, my aim is three-fold: First, I aim to illustrate the irreducibility of Levinas's thought to an exclusively liberal reading. In the first chapter I examine the political implications of Levinas's ethics of responsibility, and explore his radical critique of the western liberal imagination in its approach to the political, and to liberation, freedom, peace, and justice. In the second chapter I elaborate on Levinas's conception of the subject, and suggest that Levinas's phenomenology of the face articulates subjectivity through its passive exposure to the other's suffering, and not through the individual's conscious awakening to their own rights and freedoms. Consequently, Levinas's approach to subjectivity offers a different conception of the agent of social change, one whose agency and impetus for liberatory praxis, rather than being grounded in a virile agency of a freedom, is anchored in the anarchy of irreducible responsibility of one-for-the-unique-other---I call this an "ethicopolitical subjectivity.".;Third, through establishing an affinity between Levinas's eschatological vision of peace and Gandhi's radical, non-violent political praxis, I aim to demonstrate the substantiation of Levinas's ethicopolitics in human history. I suggest that Levinas's substituting praxis offers a new approach to liberation in which the fear for the other is replaced by fear for the other, and provides liberatory praxis an opportunity to mark its radical distance from violence.;My general aim is to demonstrate that a much more radical reading of Levinas is not only possible, but urgently needed.;Second, I aim to develop, from Levinas's ethical relation, a theory of liberatory praxis. I claim that in Levinas's ethicopolitics there exists an ethical structure of collective political praxis that breaks with the western notion of liberation. Toward this end, in the third chapter I use the notion of "ethicopolitical subjectivity" to develop Levinas's substitution as the trans-subjective sociopolitical expression of the ethical relation. I claim that substitution can be read as the constitutive moment of liberatory political praxis, one which is informed by an eschatological vision of peace and non-violence. |
