Radical Passivity Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas
Levinas’s ethical metaphysics is essentially a meditation on what makes ethical agency possible – that which enables us to act in the interest of another, to put the well-being of another before our own. This line of questioning found its inception in and
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LIBRARY OF ETHICS AND APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Volume 20
Editor in Chief Marcus Düwell, Utrecht University, Utrecht (The Netherlands), [email protected]
Editorial Board Deryck Beyleveld, Durham University, Durham (UK), [email protected] David Copp, University of Florida (USA), [email protected] Nancy Fraser, New School for Social Research, New York (USA), [email protected] Martin van Hees, Groningen University (The Netherlands), [email protected] Thomas Hill, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (USA), [email protected] Samuel Kerstein, University of Maryland, College Park (USA), [email protected] Will Kymlicka, Queens University, Ontario (Canada), [email protected] Philip van Parijs, Louvaine-la-Neuve (Belgium) en Harvard (USA), [email protected] Qui Renzong, [email protected] Peter Schaber, Ethikzentrum, University of Zürich (Switzerland), [email protected] Thomas Schmidt, Humboldt University, Berlin (Germany), [email protected]
For other titles published in this series, go to http://www.springer.com/series/6230
Benda Hofmeyr Editor
Radical Passivity Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas
Editor Benda Hofmeyr Radboud University Nijmegen Department of Philosophical Anthropology Faculty of Philosophy 6500 HD Nijmegen The Netherlands and University of Pretoria Department of Philosophy Pretoria 0002 South Africa
ISBN 978-1-4020-9346-3
e-ISBN 978-1-4020-9347-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008940144 © 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper springer.com
Preface
Levinas’s ethical metaphysics is essentially a meditation on what makes ethical agency possible – that which enables us to act in the interest of another, to put the well-being of another before our own. This line of questioning found its inception in and drew its inspiration from the mass atrocities that occurred during the Second World War. The Holocaust, like the Cambodian genocide, or those in Rwanda and Srebrenica, exemplifies what have come to be known as the ‘never again’ situations. After these events, we looked back each time, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, asking ourselves how we could possibly have let it all happen again. And yet, atrocity crimes are still rampant. After Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–1995), came Kosovo (1999) and Darfur (2003). In our present-day world, hate crimes motivated by racial, sexual, or other prejudice, and mass hate such as genocide and terror, are on the rise (think, for example, of Burma, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and North Korea). A critical revaluation of the conditi
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