The Ethics of Imagination: Levinas, Aesthetics and Poiesis in uTOpia

Before Al Gore's 2005 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” ignited general public concern for the worsening environmental crisis, artists played a crucial role in both exemplifying ecological concerns and in building alternative living and social arrangements. They did so with a sense of “creative responsibility” that formal political and legal institutions seemed incapable of harnessing or acting upon. This thesis looks at how such activist aesthetic movements occurring simultaneously in Toronto and Windsor, Ontario, unleashed a form of “constituent imagination” at once critical, constructive and apparently more responsible than our traditionally “official” systems of responsibility. As these movements crystallized into a contemporary form of utopian thinking characterized by anti-foundationalism, aestheticism, and a deep sense of interconnected responsibility to “invisible others,” it is argued that these movements are best understood and analyzed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. By concretely situating and assessing long-standing limitations within Levinas' philosophy in terms of these activist movements, including the relationship between Levinas' aesthetic and ethical theory, his applicability to globalized scales of political responsibility, and the boundaries of his legal proximity and aesthetics of judgment, the thesis uncovers an “ethics of imagination” that brings Levinas into 21st century law and politics as an an-archic means of conceptualizing the world “otherwise” within the everyday.