The aesthetics of the other: Ethics, Judaism and the work of art in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas

This dissertation is a strategic intervention into the work of Emmanuel Levinas in order to uncover and develop the aesthetic core that persists across differing modalities of life. Its main thesis is that Levinas's view of art and aesthetics can be re-read against Levinas himself to generate a set of useful tools for re-inscribing the space of aesthetics in such a way as to escape the homogenizing tendencies of power, and, to address how it is possible for individuals to assert an ethically responsible aesthetic constitution of themselves.;Chapter One systematically explores and follows various articulations of aesthetics throughout Levinas's corpus of writing. The examination reveals the productive ambiguity tied up in Levinas's conception of aesthetics which forges a new path for thinking aesthetics through the concept of powerlessness.;Chapter Two turns to another site of conceptual productiveness, the interference between philosophy and Judaism. The materiality of Jewish life, examined through the concepts of messianism and memory, and the problem of idolatry are interrogated. Ways that these themes can be mobilized in evaluating questions about aesthetics are indicated. In the end, aesthetics rests at the core of "being Jewish.".;Chapter Three approaches the aesthetic from the point of interference between politics and Judaism in order to resist casting the work of art as either the formation of socially adhesive meaning or as an "aestheticization of the political." A regime of politics characterized as "midrashic," as well as a concept of political subjectivity are developed through encounters with contemporary political philosophers.;Chapter Four examines the tension between Levinas's antipathy towards art and poetic language, and the distinct style that his terminology carries with it. By attending to the "how" of Levinas's lexicon the affective force of his writing emerges to destabilize the opposition between aesthetics and ethics.;Chapter Five sketches the space of aesthetics and the particulars of the work of art by detailing the ways in which the work of art works in its discrete receptive space to produce what I call the body of art while gesturing to variant forms of life that interrupt our habitual formations.