Emmanuel Levinas and ethical materialism

The article discusses concrete and material aspects of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics. Firstly, the paper shows that, in contrast to several alternative modern conceptions of subjectivity, the Levinasian subject is not at a safe distance from the world but involved in it through sensing and “enjoyment” and therefore vulnerability. After that the paper highlights the materiality and concreteness of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics, a “deformalization” radically opposed to abstractness. It is precisely owing to the transcendence of the Other that the face is always concrete, always a specific, concrete, material solicitation of aid.