Exteriority as Law

Revisiting the Masochean turn within Levinas

Bibliographic Data

ID12248602
AuthorsReuben Carias (0000-0002-6023-092X, University of Westminster, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume35
Issue1
Pages173-190
Publication date2023-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLaw and Critique (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0957-8536 • E-ISSN: 1572-8617
PublisherSpringer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1007/s10978-022-09342-1
OpenAlexW4318773970
LanguageEN
References cited19

Adopting Kantor’s Masochean turn within Levinas, this article challenges the anthropocentrically limited purview of Levinas’s ethical relation. Incorporating Kantor’s legalistic reading of Levinas, informed through his literary analysis of Sacher-Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’, the article details the inescapable, legalistic plight that is to be the Levinasian ethical subject. Extending upon Kantor’s introductory conceptualisation of the Levinasian subject through Masoch, reveals a subject for whom suffering and sacrifice must be embraced; necessary acts of penitence before an irrepressible Other who they adore. The Other is presented through Masoch’s text as an insatiable, inescapable deity of Law who cannot be refused and demands subservience. A god manifest in Exteriority whose influence upon the subject extends beyond the frame of the interhuman relation and is a necessary component of the subject’s existence and, more broadly, their world. The Levinasian subject’s relation with alterity poetically portraying all the potency, affirmation and urgency of dear Severin’s with his Venus, a relation which destroys, haunts and affirms the subject completely as only Law can

Alterity · Epistemology · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database · Sociology · Subject (documents · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

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