A reluctant poetics

pp. 41-67

in: Peter Fifield, Late modernist style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas, Berlin, Springer, 2013

Abstract

A number of the prominent issues that arise in Levinas's discussions of literature can be fruitfully examined via a reading of Beckett's late play Catastrophe. These relate both to the philosopher's prescriptions about literature and to his iconic formulation of the "face" of the other. This is the first mature articulation in Levinas's oeuvre of the means by which the other is encountered. It is, moreover, the single most prominent concept in the reception and dissemination of Levinas's thought. Put simply, for many, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is the philosophy of the face-to-face.