Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility The Ethical Significance of Time [Hardcover]

Levinas's account of responsibility challenges dominant notions of time, autonomy, and subjectivity according to Cynthia D. Coe. Employing the concept of trauma in Levinas's late writings, Coe draws together his understanding of time and his claim that responsibility is an obligation to the other that cannot be anticipated or warded off. Tracing the broad significance of these ideas, Coe shows how Levinas revises our notions of moral agency, knowledge, and embodiment. Her focus on time brings a new interpretive lens to Levinas's work and reflects on a wider discussion of the fragmentation of human experience as an ethical subject. Coe's understanding of trauma and time offers a new appreciation of how Levinas can inform debates about gender, race, mortality, and animality.

Cynthia D. Coe is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Central Washington University. She is author (with Matthew C. Altman) ofThe Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy.

The book is straightforward and trustworthy. It does not engage in obscurantism or speak overmuch Levinasese; it does not misrepresent Levinas's ideas; and it engages with secondary sources extensively and generously.

Cynthia D. Coe extends Levinas's analysis of vulnerability, which he understands in highly embodied terms, into an exploration of the implications that such embodied responsibility has for our ways of thinking about mortality, gender, race, and animality. Coe never loses the subtlety and complexity of the notions involved, a pleasure to read.

Cynthia D. Coe's bookis a thoughtful, well-researched, and accessible contribution to the English-language scholarship on Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy.

Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Deformalizing Time
2. The Traumatic Impact of Deformalized Time
3. The Method of An-Archeology
4. Between Theodicy and Despair
5. The Sobering Up of Oedipus
6. Anxieties of Incarl#Ì