Ethical exegesis and ethical body in the philosophy of E. Levinas

Abstract

In this paper, I attempt to show that Levinas’s thesis “ethics as first philosophy” implies a complex approach to philosophical discourse as well as to language. I hope to demonstrate that, according to Levinas, the pattern of reading and debating produced by the long tradition of Western philosophical thinking has to be revised. This implies several conceptual steps which could be described as ethical exegesis and ethical body. The ethical exegesis manifests a practice of listening to and being for the other interlocutor, that primarily directed to the embodied subject in all its vivacity of life. Adhering to phenomenological tradition I explore Levinas’s account of language — the saying and the said, to show that the core of the linguistic structure is sensibility and embodied proximity. My main argument is that Levinas does not only revise the work of language in philosophical discourse, but he also finds another approach to dialogue, response, and listening. In other words, objectifying language becomes posterior and is subordinated to ethical exegesis that is described as an encounter with the embodied other. I also draw attention to specific structures of sensibility and proximity which are necessary components of the ethical body. One of the important theses to follow up is that Levinas’s continual refinement of the concept of exegesis is necessary for retracing an approach to the transcendence in a dialogue of two interlocutors.