I've been increasingly fascinated recently by the work of Emmanuel Levinas
and the possibilities of reading him next to Foucault's work. This would
also prove fertile ground for some of the recent discussion of humanism
and antihumanism on this list. Allow me to quote again from Tony Davies'
book that I mentioned in an earlier post. This deserves more exploration,
and if anyone knows of any insightful works on Foucault and Levinas,
please mention them.
"The Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas has written of the possibility of
an 'humanisme de l'autre homme', a concept and practice of the human that
proceeds not -- like Descartes' self-contemplative 'I' or Kant's
transcendental subjectivity -- from a primary centered ego reaching out to
know and seize the world, but from an irreducible 'other', the not-I that
defines me for myself. Levinas retraces here the gestures of those
structural and post-humanist thinkers like Saussure, Levi-Strauss,
Foucault, and the psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan, for whom the speaking,
conscious 'I' is always provisional and secondary to the orders of
language and social meaning within which it constructs itself. But his
writing, though refreshingly free of the complacent philanthropic piety of
much contemporary humanism, retains an ethical register denied to those
for whom the human is simply an effect of structure or discourse. Humanity
is neither an essence nor an end, but a continuous and precarious process
of becoming human, a process that entails the inescapable recognition that
our humanity is on loan from others, to precisely the extent that we
acknowledge it in them." (Davies, 132)
Nathan