Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility

Emmanuel Levinas (1906––1995) is widely considered one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the last century. Renowned for his thesis that ethics is first philosophy and his concepts of the ‘Other’ and the ‘face’, Levinas thematizes teaching as central to his conception of subjectivity. While his writings in this area continue to gain influence within broad aspects of educational theory, their political relevance has been curiously overlooked. Levinas, Subjectivity, Education  examines how the philosophical writings of Levinas lead us to reassess the concept of education, paving the way for a radical new understanding of ethical and political responsibility. Offering a bold new interpretation of Levinas’s philosophy that addresses the importance of the figure of the teacher in his writing, Anna Strhan demonstrates the challenge of his work for contemporary debates on autonomy, marketization, and political subjectivity in education. She draws also on Levinas’s writings on religion—both to analyse its practical implications within religious education and to consider how this philosophy relates to his pedagogy. By broadening the interpretive aspects of Levinas’s educational writings,  Levinas, Subjectivity, Education  sheds important new light on the on–going relevance of one of the towering figures of twentieth–century philosophy.

Preface vi Acknowledgements viii List of Abbreviations x Introduction 1 PART I Levinas′s Teaching 17 1 Teaching, Subjectivity and Language in Totality and Infinity 19 2 The Infinite Responsibility of the Ethical Subject in Otherwise than Being 44 PART II Towards an Education Otherwise 71 3 Heteronomy, Autonomy and the Aims of Education 73 4 Grace, Truth and Economies of Education 95 PART III ′Concrete Problems with Spiritual Repercussions′ 119 5 Towards a Religious Education Otherwise 121 6 Dialogue, Proximity and the Possibility of Community 141 7 Political Disappointment, Hope and the Anarchic Ethical Subject 175 Coda 199 Bibliography 204 Index 212

Anna Strhan is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent, where she is researching the formation of religious subjectivities in contemporary British society. With a background in philosophy of education, cultural sociology, and religious studies, Strhan’s work explores relationships between knowledge, meaning, embodiment and ethics in modern societies.