The Other Who Remains Other: From Levinas to Spinoza
The term “antipathy” does not quite capture the attitude displayed towards Spinoza in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s severe criticisms of Spinoza are brief and focused on the latter’s “betrayal” of Judaism (signaled by his excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam) and his mer...
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| Formato: | Artículo revista |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
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Centro de Estudios Avanzados. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
2025
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| Acceso en línea: | https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/revesint/article/view/50963 |
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| Sumario: | The term “antipathy” does not quite capture the attitude displayed towards Spinoza in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s severe criticisms of Spinoza are brief and focused on the latter’s “betrayal” of Judaism (signaled by his excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam) and his merely “philological” reading of Scripture in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. I will argue that his real encounter with Spinoza’s thought appears elsewhere, in a text that nowhere names or alludes to him: Levinas’s 1963 essay, “The Trace of the Other.” It is here, and in a lexicon derived from Husserl and Sartre, that Levinas introduces the notion of the “Other who remains other” even in the face of the “allergy to the Other” endemic to Western Civilization and its philosophy. Levinas’ notion, burdened with its own ambiguities and unanswered questions, is clarified by Spinoza’s meditation at the end of EIV, where he explores the difficulties involved in resisting the powerful mechanisms that work constantly to reduce the Other to the Same and cost born by those unwilling or unable to assimilate. Thus, we might say that Levinas, by posing the question of the Other who remains other, allowed us to read the answers Spinoza provided three hundred years earlier. |
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