Emmanuel Levinas on Surrender and Self-Sacrifice: A Response to Simone Drichel

Abstract

Simone Drichel’s “Emmanuel Levinas and the ‘Specter of Masochism’” raises important questions not only about whether Levinas’s ethics is a masochism but also about the sense in which we may speak of a Levinasian ethics at all and of the primacy Levinas attributes to it. Drichel’s development of his account of “surrender” and “vulnerability” represent an illuminating entry point into Levinas’s thought. However, questions can be raised as to whether she is right to insist on a dichotomy inherited from traditional ethics between the for itself and the for others, between self-preservation and self-sacrifice.

Keywords:

• Levinas
• relationality
• sensibility
• self-sacrifice
• surrender
• vulnerability

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Bernasconi

Robert Bernasconi, is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State University.