Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas

by Emmanuel Levinas

Book Overview

Recent debates within Continental philosophy have decisively renewed the question of the ethical, with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) as its center. Coming from yet in contestation with the phenomenological traditions of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas defines ethics as an originary response to the face of the other. For him, language is an exception to a habitual economy that represses alterity and maintains the asymmetry and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804743096
• ISBN13: 9780804743099
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Entry Into Levinas

This collection of interviews is one of the best ways to enter into the world of Levinas. It is a world from which one exits transformed. Levinas may be the most important thinker of the past century; he is certainly the one thinker who has been willing to gaze into the suffering of the 20th century and to emerge with a vision and a challenge for those of us who are seeking for a way of thinking that does not ignore the bloody past. These interviews introduce one to Levinas through his own descriptions of his childhood. They, moreover, usher the reader into the difficult, yet profound, thoughts of levinas: the face, the other, God, and justice. If you are tempted to jump into the world of Levinas, do so first through these interviews. Then, when you have acclimated yourself to his world, you might consider some of his more challenging works.