/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11108388]

What does /lit/ think of Levinas. I'm current reading Totality and Infinity and I'm having a hard time parsing his association of the other with infinity. I think I understand the idea of the Other giving the I something beyond its capacity and the other exceeding the idea of the other that is in the I, but I don't see how this relation has to do with infinity. Can anyone else more familiar with Levinas clarify?

[Anonymous No.11109038]

>>11108388
Bumping for potentially interesting thread.

[bumping a bad thread No.11109065]

>>11108388
bumping a bad thread

[Anonymous No.11109087]

The tautology of ipseity is an egoism lol

[Anonymous No.11109123]

>>11108388
If you want to understand the phenomenology of self consciousness there are much better shit to read than Levinas

[Anonymous No.11109128]

>>11109123
Such as?

[Anonymous No.11109141]

>>11109128
Hegel for example

[Anonymous No.11109158]

>>11109141
Good example, got any more? What anime is that from?

[Anonymous No.11110849]

>>11109065
Bumping a bad post

[Anonymous No.11111031]

>>11108388
probably wrong here because i've been reading Badiou's Being & Event, but I believe he means infinity in the immanent sense of proceeding outward from the one (i.e. the void-of-the-infinite is the negation of the one, which moves outward to the infinite in its self-same determination)

[Anonymous No.11111238]

>>11108388
I've read some of his smaller essays. Trace of the Other and the one on Celan. What I get is the other ie total otherness (the totally-different-from-myself, the other-individual) represents infinity because it's an escape from the (finite) self, and exists eternally outside oneself. Conversing with the other is an unstoppable event.

>the idea of the Other giving the I something beyond its capacity and the other exceeding the idea of the other that is in the I

The Other which is in the I is 'finite' because the self is finite, but the outer other, the "material" other, shows something eternally subsisting and recreating, an eternal 'self' that is never fully in oneself.

I could be talking nonsense though so here's a quote from stanford.

> Trans-ascendence, or Levinas's transcendence, evinces the surprising characteristic of being both a common everyday event, a relation, and what he will call “Infinity.” Now, insofar as Infinity means the not-finite, it refers to the unmasterable quality of human expression. So far as Infinity has a positive sense, then it has the affective qualities of desire for sociality, and of joy. Thus, Infinity, before we interpret it as “God” or reify it as a highest being, is a quotidian event that takes place at the sensuous-affective level, and repeats. If it repeats without leaving a clear memory of itself, then this is because it repeats pre-cognitively and pre-intentionally—like a memory ‘of the flesh’, as adumbrated by Merleau-Ponty and his fundamental historicity.[23] Having bracketed any psychological unconscious, always too much the mirror of consciousness itself, Levinas will insist on the ontological significance of the body and the flesh: these are always already in relation with something, be it only air and light. And sensibility consists of an indeterminate number of affectations, of which we become conscious only by turning our attention to them. Levinas's ‘pre-conscious’ sensibility is thus the ongoing shadow or double of the intentional ‘I’. Like the embodied self, who suffocated within itself in 1935 (in nausea), the self of sensibility is the locus of relationality and transcendence in 1961.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/#LogTotInf

[Anonymous No.11112413]

>>11111031
>>11111238
Thanks guys. One other question. To what extent is the other theological. I know it's intended to be a little theological, but I don't know if the other merely includes the theological or is entirely theological. I'm gravitating towards the latter, mainly because Levinas says that the other is something "wholly other" and other humans don't really strike me as fulfilling this "wholly other" criterion because humans still belong in the same community in spite of their differences. Perhaps I'm sneaking in Sartre's idea of the other in my reading of Levinas. Does Sartre's other and Levina's other have nothing to do with each other apart from having the same name?

[Anonymous No.11113134]

Finitude is meant in a very specific Hegelian/Kantian conceptual framework sense

Infinite does not necessarily mean "everything," it can be "anything beyond the finite," especially in principle / in general

[Anonymous No.11113144]

who was the first author to use the technical term "the Other" in this particular sense? For some reason I always thought it was Buber.

[Anonymous No.11113152]

>>11113144
Because of I-Thou? I think Fichte and Hegel but I'm sure there are earlier traces

[Anonymous No.11113251]

>>11112413
Different anon here but if you're interested in the theological aspects of the other you might find this reading of Deleuze's notion of faciality against Levinas' face of the other to be very illuminating:
https://danieltutt.com/2012/01/26/whats-a-face-why-dismantle-it/

[Anonymous No.11113285]

>>11113144
Husserl?

[Anonymous No.11114226]

>>11108388
This man, in my country he is everything

[Anonymous No.11115704]

>>11113285
>>11113144
I'd probably say this is the closest answer if you want that particular sense.

[Anonymous No.11117134]

>>11109141
Well meme'd my dude.