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Document Details : Title: Le bourgeois dans la pensée d'Emmanuel Levinas Subtitle: Le refus de l'altérité Author(s): COLIN, Yoann Journal: Etudes phénoménologiques - Phenomenological Studies Volume: 7 Date: 2023 Pages: 125-144 DOI: 10.2143/EPH.7.0.3291057 Abstract : As a discreet but recurrent figure, the bourgeois in Levinas’s writings appears as a model of narrow-mindedness and indifference to all kinds of otherness. It seems relevant to analyse the different ways in which this bourgeois figure relates to Levinas’s own other-blindness. On the one hand Levinas considers that most of Western philosophy is 'bourgeois' in that it does not allow for any form of otherness, except by reducing it to being and, in the last resort, to being in a way that gives rise to a self-involved bourgeois subject. On the other hand, the Levinassian ethics, which has otherness at its heart, is fundamentally opposed to the bourgeois, prudent and measured morality. In the end, the Levinassian conceptions of justice and of the state strive not to be reduced to the bourgeois use of the law and the levelling of individual singularities when passed through the sieve of the universal. |
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