Proper Names (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

About this book

Combining elements from Heideggers philosophy of being-in-the-world and the tradition of Jewish theology Levinas has evolved a new type of ethics based on a concept of the Other in two different but complementary aspects. He describes his encounters with those philosophers and literary authors (most of them his contemporaries) whose writings have most significantly contributed to the construction of his own philosophy of Otherness: Agnon Buber Celan Delhomme Derrida Jabs Kierkegaard Lacroix Laporte Picard Proust Van Breda Wahl and most notably Blanchot. At the same time Levinass own texts are inscriptions and documents of those encounters with Others around which his philosophy is turning. Thus the texts simultaneously convey an immediate experience of how his intellectual position emerged and how it is put into practice. A third potential function of the book is that it unfolds the network of references and persons in philosophical debates since Kierkegaard.