The intervention of the other: Levinas and Lacan on ethical subjectivity

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of the work of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Lacan, two important thinkers in a landscape of thought roughly labeled “post-humanist.” Through a close reading of several of their most important texts, it illuminates their positions on the nature of human subjectivity in general, and ethical subjectivity in particular.;The first section of this dissertation reads key texts by Lévinas and Lacan side by side in order to see the points at which their thinking converges and the points at which their thinking diverges. In three chapters, it focuses on topics of central concern to each thinker: (a) the intervention of the other as the founding moment of subjectivity either uncovering an original goodness (Lévinas) or creating an original alienation (Lacan); (b) sexual difference as either a model for (Lévinas) or a constitutive mode of (Lacan) subjectivity; and (c) language as constitutive of subjectivity as either ethical (Lévinas) or ordered by the unconscious (Lacan). Here we come to see the ways in which Lévinas's conception of the ethical subject is representative of a “humanism of the other person” while Lacan's conception, of the split subject is representative of an anti-humanism. The second and third sections look at key texts by Lévinas and Lacan in isolation from one another. In two chapters, section two focuses on Lévinas's treatments of (a) the idea of God and (b) the concept of time as diachronous, in order to posit “an-archic” foundations for the ethical subject. Also in two chapters, section three focuses on Lacan's treatment of (a) the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (the unconscious, repetition, transference, and the drive) and (b) the psychoanalytic notion of “desire” as constitutive of human subjectivity, in order to explain an “ethic” of psychoanalysis as an ethic of the knowledge of the unconscious. In this, I make way for the conclusion in which I bring together these two disparate thinkers in order to posit a vision ethical of subjectivity which takes seriously Lévinas and Lacan precisely in their disagreements—a vision of the ethical subject as the “desiring subject for-the-other.”...