A Figure of Rhetoric: Holiness, Hyperbole, and Embodied Subjectivity in the Later Writings of Emmanuel Levinas

Later in his life the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas characterized his work in terms of holiness, famously commenting to Jacques Derrida, “You know, one often speaks of ethics to describe what I do, but what really interests me in the end is not ethics, not ethics alone, but the holy, the holiness of the holy.” Throughout the four chapters of A Figure of Rhetoric holiness is discussed as giving priority to the needs of others over my own, as the response of “here I am,” and as the “non-indifference” towards the other, all of which reveal the possibility of a saintly existence. Saints do not consider their vulnerability to others to be a hindrance, but rather, they allow this vulnerability and exposure to others to become a central aspect of their lives. From this viewpoint, holiness consists of a hyperbolic condition wherein the self is answerable both to and for the other. In A Figure of Rhetoric I maintain that this depiction of the hyperbolic structure of our subjectivity in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas indicates a lived possibility. Driven to give an account for why we witness and carry out acts of generosity and responsibility, and heavily influenced by Edith Wyschogrod, my dissertation follows and explicates the ethical framework of Levinas’s later work. I argue that responsibility and compassion emerge from a pre-reflective susceptibility to others and from an understanding of ourselves as primordially and inescapably responsible. In short, this project highlights the significance of affectivity and corporeality for the ways in which one incurs and expresses responsibility. It is in my proximity to the other that I experience a claim of responsibility and I signify to the other my own selfhood of devotion. In A Figure of Rhetoric I insist that the themes of holiness and hyperbole provide a hermeneutical key for better understanding Levinas’s later writings, but more directly and perhaps more boldly, I argue that holiness and hyperbole denote or delineate the original mode of the religious and the ethical. Lastly, my project addresses the various objections from the psychoanalytic tradition concerning the possibility of other-centered living.Ph.D