Levinas as a Media Theorist:

Philosophy & Rhetoric Feb 2014

Amit Pinchevski Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the way Levinas communicates his ethical message through the media at work in his work: speech, writing, and rare references to modern media. Levinas's ethical message concerns the import of the relation with the other, a relation that interrupts any attempt at its thematization, including Levinas's own philosophy. Levinas's text serves as an exemplary medium for this ethical message in conveying the teaching of ethics along with the interruption it advocates. The article then extends the logic of the ethical message beyond the two key media present in Levinas's work—speech and writing—to speculate on whether the interruption it effects can be carried over to audiovisual media. Running throughout is the question of mediation, which takes the discussion outside the context of the face to face, where Levinas's thought is typically situated, to the context of the third and of justice. Levinas's thought may thus lead toward a radical ethics of media—radical in the sense that it posits the act of mediation itself as the root of such ethics.

Journal: Philosophy & Rhetoric
Published: 2014-02-01
DOI: 10.5325/philrhet.47.1.0048
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multimodality

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Cites in this index (1)

Lipari (2012)

Rhetoric's Other:

Philosophy & Rhetoric

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