On the Left-wing Reading of Levinas: Derrida, Lingis, Dussel

Abstract

Leftists have often received the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas with suspicion, on the grounds that it seems to lack a political appreciation of exploitation. While Levinas’s thought includes strong considerations of cultural particularity, his ethics also emphasizes responsibility to the physical suffering of the oppressed. A reading of Derrida’s approach to the political applications of Levinas’s thought reveals broader significance to elements of Levinas’s messianism than his Zionism first suggests. Building on this deconstructive reading, the respective works of Alphonso Lingis and Enrique Dussel emerge as new investigations of the political importance of Levinasan ethics to contemporary socialism.