The Intersubjectivity of Time: Levinas and Infinite Responsibility

Published in 2013 | paper | ISBN: 978-0-8207-0463-0 Book Information: 'The essential theme of my research is the deformalization of the notion of time,' asserted Emmanuel Levinas in a 1988 interview, toward the end of his long philosophical career. But while the notion of time is fundamental to the development of every key theme in Levinas's thought - the idea of the infinite, the issue of the alterity of the other, the face of the other, the question of our ethical relations with other people, the role of fecundity, speech and language, and radical responsibility - his view of time remains obscure. Yael Lin's exhaustive look at Levinas's primary texts, both his philosophical writings and his writings on Judaism, brings together his various perspectives on time. Lin concludes that we can, indeed, extract a coherent and consistent conception of time from Levinas's thought, one that is distinctly political.  First situating Levinas's views against the background of two of his most influ