Religions. Special Issue 'Levinas and the Political'

Emmanuel Levinas has taught that ethics is straightforwardness itself, the sincerity of the face soliciting assistance, the inter-humanity constituted through our moral responsiveness, and the laws and institutions of justice that responsibility requires to keep oppression and exploitation at bay. And yet we know that in today’s world police states, global corporations, capitalist commodification and mass media surveil, deceive and exploit humanity through the manipulation and even manufacture of desires in a posthumanity in which nothing is what it seems. This volume raises the questions of how to be ethical in today’s environment and if and how an ethical politics is possible. There is a great deal of literature on this contemporary topic. The distinctive character of this volume, however, is to examine and develop these central questions from the perspective of Levinas’s ethics of the other person. Religions is the appropriate journal for this discussion because Levinas’s ethics is at once, and explicitly, a morality and a religious calling. In this particular issue of Religions we will draw upon the scholarship of those scholars who have participated in the 5th and 6th Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar (LPSS), directed annually by noted Levinas scholar Richard A. Cohen. The 5th LPSS, on the topic “Morality, Justice and the Political,” was held at the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, July, from July 17 to 21, 2017. Fourteen American scholars, selected from a larger pool of applicants, attended. This summer seminar was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The 6th LPSS, on the topic “Ideology and Justice,” is to be held at the University of Chicago Center in Paris, France, from July 2 to 6, 2018. It is anticipated that sixteen international scholars will participate. Contributors to the special issue of Religions will be drawn from selected attendees from both the 2017 and 2018 LPSS.