Benjamin Hutchens

Two quotations:
"Unfortunately, nowadays phenomenology is on the margins of mainstream thought and is no longer associated with any radical movements. Most philosophers do not seem interested in Husserl's intriguing method for slipping out of traditional problems of experience. There are many excellent appraisals of Levinas's relationship with phenomenology, which will not be emphasized in this book. I have made this alarming decision because phenomenological jargon is an insufficient background for interpreting the relevance of Levinas's work" (11).

The above series of contradictory logical clunkers is not, thankfully, representative of the book as a whole. This is just its worst point. Too bad.

This is more representative: "Levinas's efforts on behalf of the ethics of responsibility and laudatory. As a metaphysical visionary, he has offered us a grand, sweeping view of human history and man's proper place within it. However...the stakes are very high. If Levinas is taken to be correct, then nothing less than a radical revision of ethics in particular, and philosophy and its means of application, would be necessary. The problem, of course, consists in whether he can be taken to be correct" (155).

Hutchens' introduction, then, is peculiar for its suspicious testing of its subject. This is no mere guide or loveletter; and, while Levinas would likely accuse Hutchens of engaging in nothing but an ontology of power, I've left the book wanting to read Badiou on ethics and against Levinas (and also Irigaray's assault on Levinas's bizarre and repulsive animalization of the beloved). I am, after all, an atheist, and not in the sense that Levinas is a theistic atheist (or atheistic theist). I mean I don't believe in the One, or at least I believe the One's split by lack..… (more)