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Plato and Levinas on Relations to the Other ESSENTIAL VULNERABILITIES series editor John Russon REREADING ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY ESSENTIAL VULNERABILITIES Plato and Levinas on Relations to the Other DEBORAH ACHTENBERG NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS • EVANSTON , ILLINOI S Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2014. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-0-8101-3563-5 The Library of Congress has cataloged the original, hardcover edition as follows: Achtenberg, Deborah, 1951– author. Essential vulnerabilities : Plato and Levinas on relations to the Other / Deborah Achtenberg. pages cm. — (Rereading ancient philosophy) ISBN 978-0-8101-2994-8 (cloth : alk. paper) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Plato. 2. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 3. Other (Philosophy) 4. Self (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Series: Rereading ancient philosophy. B395.A27 2014 184—dc23 2014007867 Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this li- cense, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Achtenberg, Deborah. Essential Vulnerabilities: Plato and Levinas on Relations to the Other. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017. The following material is excluded from the license: Earlier versions of chapters 1 and 3 as outlined in the acknowledgments. For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit http://www.nupress.northwestern. edu/. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries work- ing with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high- quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations xi Introduction 3 Part I Totality and Infinity Chapter 1: Violence 25 Chapter 2: Freedom 40 Chapter 3: Creation 71 Chapter 4: Knowledge 98 Part II Otherwise Than Being Chapter 5: Time and the Self 117 Chapter 6: Violence, Freedom, Creation, Knowledge 135 Chapter 7: Glory and Shine 159 Conclusion 189 Notes 191 Bibliography 199 Index 205 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is the accomplishment of many years’ different endeavors and shows the impact of people who have influenced me in many different peri- ods of my academic life and career. I first read dialogues of Plato in high school English. That study, among other things, led me to attend undergraduate school at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. The influence of that institution, and those who shaped it and carried it on when I was there, is never missing from my ap- proach to Plato. In graduate school at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, I learned to read Platonic dialogues in Greek and in English with my teacher, Stewart Umphrey. My interpretation of some of the dialogues discussed here was guided and influenced by his and motivated and inspired by my time reading them with him. I was also fortunate to at- tend classes on Plato and Aristotle taught at the Graduate Faculty by Seth Benardete when he was on the faculty at New York University. His interpre- tations of various Platonic dialogues, as well as of central Platonic concepts in ontology, influenced my ontological reading of Plato. When I had just returned to reading twentieth-century continental Eu- ropean philosophy in the 1990s, Dana Hollander appeared in Reno as a gift and a guide to the field and to its institutions as well as its interpretive con- texts and tendencies and their relevance to my own. My reading of Levinas, both in its content and in its impetus, is immeasurably influenced by her model. James D. Hatley’s approach to Levinas, and to the issues that Levinas approaches and pushes us to approach, has been a comfort and a spur to me, as have our numerous conversations over the years. Thanks as well to Oona Eisenstadt, Martin Kavka, and Bettina Bergo for helpful discussions about Levinas and related topics in recent years. For institutional structure, intel- lectual community, and moral support, I am indebted to the members and leaders of the Levinas Research Seminar (LRS), the North American Levi- nas Society (NALS), and the Society for Continental Philosophy in a Jewish Context (CPJC). An early version of chapter 3 was read at LRS, and early versions of chapter 1 and chapter 7 at NALS. CPJC has been, and continues to be, an important and collegial institutional crossroads for me. Thanks also to Silvia Benso for organizing the Levinas and the Ancients panel at the International Society for Philosophy and Literature meeting vii viii acknowledgments in Helsinki where I read an early version of section 1 of chapter 2, to Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder for editing the volume, Levinas and the Ancients, in which early version of chapter 3 of this book appears, and to Antonio Cal- cagno for his interest in an earlier version of chapter 1 of this book (which he published in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy). Thanks also to the many students with whom I have read and discussed Plato and Levinas including, recently, Matthew Abbott, whose masters thesis on Levi- nas I directed, Daniel Gebhardt and Shaun Grekor, with whom I read Plato’s Hippias Major, and students in my recent classes on Plato and Levinas. Fi- nally, thanks to what I am happy still to call my department at my univer- sity, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Reno, for granting me the sabbatical during which I began work on this book and to the University of California, Los Angeles, and its Center for Jewish Stud- ies where, sponsored by the center, I spent that productive and stimulating academic year. In Reno, my work on this book has been supported by my department, by the College of Liberal Arts Scholarly and Creative Activities Grants Pro- gram and by the University of Nevada, Reno. Thanks to them for their overall support of my work, for the opportunity to read a version of chapter 3 at a Philosophy symposium, and, in addition, for editing support and travel sup- port to various conferences where I presented papers on Levinas and Plato. My work has been supported as well by the owners, Paul Martin and Deb- bie Spieker-Martin, and all the baristas at Bibo Coffee Company, a locally owned Reno café where many parts of this book were written or revised. The fellowship and good coffee there—as well as the sense of being in a well- cared-for and humane environment—have been central to my academic life since Bibo first opened on Mt. Rose Street in 2003. Thanks also to the own- ers of the El Mono Motel in Lee Vining, California, on whose porch I have worked on this book at various times, with a glimpse of Mono Lake in the distance and easy and constant access both to their high-speed internet and to their café, Latte da Coffee. Finally, thanks to the Nevada students, faculty, community members, leg- islators, and activists who fought to preserve public higher education, and social services, in our state against difficult odds. Without your activities, I might not have had the institutional context—or possibly the heart—to complete this book, the fruit of my work for many years on the topics it con- tains. Our joint activities continually buoyed my spirits and gave me hope, even when grounds for hope—if hope can have grounds—were not clear. This book is dedicated to you, to my colleagues named above, and to all those acknowledgments ix fighting against or suffering from the ravages of the globalized world’s in- creasingly privatized economy. I hope the book addresses each of you, and that the thoughts it contains offer some measure of insight in these troubling and interesting times. ABBREVIATIONS Aristotle De An. De Anima (On the Soul) (Ross 1986) Met. Metaphysics ( Jaeger 1978) Phys. Physics (Ross 1973) Levinas BV Beyond the Verse (Mole 1994)/L’au-delà du verset: Lectures et dis- cours talmudiques (1982) EI “Ethics of the Infinite” (1995) GP “God and Philosophy” (Bergo 1998)/“Dieu et la philosophie” (1986) LF “Love and Filiation” (1982) LT “Loving the Torah More Than God” (1990)/“Aimer la Thora plus que Dieu” (1993) MS “Meaning and Sense” (Lingis 1998)/“La signification et le sense” (1964) OB Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (Lingis 1981)/Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974) OG Of God Who Comes to Mind (1998)/De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (1998) PI “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite” (Lingis 1998)/“La phi- losophie et l’idée de l’infini” (1967) SU “Summary of Totality and Infinity” (Peperzak 1997)/“Résumé de Totalité et Infini” (1961) TI Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Lingis 1969)/ Totalité et Infini: Essay sur l’extériorité (1961) ToO Toward the Other (1994)/Texte du Traite “Yoma” (85a–85b) (1994) Plato Ap. Apology (Burnet 1985) xi xii abbreviations Cr. Crito (Burnet 1985) Ep. 7 Seventh Letter (Burnet 1984) Grg. Gorgias (Burnet 1974) Hipp. Maj. Hippias Major (Burnet 1974) Lys. Lysis (Burnet 1974) Meno Meno (Burnet 1974) Phdr. Phaedrus (Burnet 1973) Phb. Philebus (Burnet 1973) Prm. Parmenides (Burnet 1973) Rep. Republic (Burnet 1972) Sym. Symposium (Burnet 1973) Tht. Theaetetus (Burnet 1985) Thucydides Hist. Histories ( Jones and Powell 1942) Hebrew Bible Deut. Deuteronomy ( JPS 1985) Ex. Exodus ( JPS 1985) Gen. Genesis ( JPS 1985) Hos. Hosea (Goldin 1983) Isa. Isaiah ( JPS 1985) Lam. Lamentations (Kravitz, Olitzky 1993) Mal. Malachi (Kravitz, Olitzky 1993) Mic.
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