Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Emmanuel Levinas argues that murder is impossible. He means that it is impossible to possess the otherness of the other person. I ask whether this is a useful way to think about violence, drawing on my experience with psychopaths.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The paper investigates how some theorists (notably Levinas, but with some reference also to Derrida and to Islamist thinker Youssef Qaradawi) have attempted to work around “foundationalist” approaches to religion in politics, resisting its reduction to “identity” no less than to a source of moral principles that do not require a de-secularization of politics and of the state. In contemporary American and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Western European academia, the possibility of engaging religion in (relation to) politics without falling into the potentially exclusionary and even violent traps of “foundationalist” or “identity” religious discourses has been articulated for the most part either in an ethical perspective or by elaborating on a tradition that emphasizes the role played by “doubt” at the very heart of “faith” (see for instance some of the work of William Connolly). However, authors like the ones I have mentioned seem to me to offer another possibility to de-construct and critically engage religion as a perhaps necessary “counterpoint” to politics (and more specifically to sovereign politics and to the state), without thereby reducing it either to ethics or to the faith/doubt dynamic. This critical engagement is in my view centered on a particular understanding of religion grounded in the law and in its practice, rather than in faith, religious morality, or identity. In what ways does a perspective on religion and politics centered on the law and on its practice differ from certain (sometimes violent) foundationalist discourses of religious identity and of religious politics today? And is this sort of perspective more promising in terms of avoiding the traps of such discourses than other perspectives that tend to reduce religion to faith/doubt, morality, or to a mere marker of identity that is liable to be mobilized and/or “de-constructed” just like any other marker of socio-political differentiation? In this paper, I will attempt to address these questions by looking at how the problem of the “other” understood as (also) a political problem is treated in the work of Levinas and Qaradawi, contrasting their perspective on this issue with the way in which the latter appears to be treated in some contemporary American literature that advocates non-secularism on ethical grounds or in the name of a “reduction” of religious to the faith/doubt dynamic.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: ABSTRACT: A venerable, and aged, thesis in social theory, posed by Rousseau, says that pity is at the cornerstone of the cultivation of a positive and productive democracy. The suggestion of an immaterial good that sustains democracy, justice, and peace—beyond the realm of procedures and government-levels of rational negotiation—is at the core of the newer paradigms operative in the studies of peace processes and conflict mediation. Political scientists, sociologists, and peacemakers now look to sustainable forms of peace, achieved not only through policy changes, but also through shifting cultural symbols, religious sentiments and metaphors, thus transforming the hearts and minds of the people (Gopin 2002; Hermann and Newman 2003; Appleby 2000). This paper explores ethnographic and interview data collected from a group of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost children in the conflict who come to reconcile with each other and work for peace through grassroots action, through mutual recognition and acceptance of other’s narratives of pain and suffering. Scholars of this particular peace process suggest that mutual acceptance of the other’s narrative, through reconciliation and empathy is the key to this peace process (Bar-Tal and Bennick 2001; Bar Siman Tov 2004). Using the political and ethical theory of Emmanuel Levinas, I describe the religious and humanist cultural roots of intra and inter personal transformations wherein “the other’s narrative of suffering” draws the members of this organization out of interminable conflict with the other.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The paper looks at the implications of Levinas’s distinction between difference and alterity for how we might conceptualise response. For Levinas, alterity is not dependent on characteristics of the other, the content of her or his difference, which make them different from me, rather otherness itself is the content of the other. It is not difference that constitutes alterity but alterity which makes difference. The alterity of the other in this reading does not result from its identity, but constitutes it. The paper proposes that thinking in terms of difference, as opposed to alterity negates the possibility of response. Levinas’s work suggests that only in facing alterity is response possible, and that thinking about response in relation to difference acts to predetermine or technologise response. This is due to the way in which difference presupposes a prior conceptualisation of the other as being like me, thus bringing them within the same and removing any outside which might be responded to. The paper explores the limitations inherent in thinking in terms of difference and explores the possible resources which may be provided by approaching questions of response in terms of alterity.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Emmanuel Levinas, by identifying a violence suffered in an immemorial past, poses himself as a theorist of trauma.