Of interpellation or invocations of fraternity and judgment

This work presents an analysis of the political in the texts of Emmanuel Levinas. It argues for the centrality of fraternity and judgment in understanding Levinas' development of the relationship between ethics and politics.; The first part of the dissertation utilizes the concept of interpellation and the paradoxes of self-reference to explore Levinas' explication of the ethical subject or subjectivity. The complexities of this ethical subjectivity are illuminated via a comparison of Levinas' notion of ethical and Louis Althusser's notion of ideological interpellation.; The second part of the dissertation focuses on the way in which Levinas' dyadic conception of ethical subjectivity is problematized by the advent of social and political plurality. Organized under his notion of fraternity, this plurality is further shown to necessitate political judgment. Due to the fact that Levinas does not significantly develop the notion of judgment suggested by his texts, his work is supplemented by an analysis of Hannah Arendt's development of political judgment out of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. Levinas' and Arendt's understanding of the political are shown to be complementary; it is argued that taken together they offer a unique vantage from which to approach contemporary political thought.