Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- Series Editor's Preface
- OPENING
- PART I
- PART II
- 5 What If the Other Were an Animal? Hegel on Jews, Animals and Disease
- 6 Agamben on ‘Jews’ and ‘Animals’
- 7 Force, Justice and the Jew: Pascal's Pensées 102 and 103
- 8 Facing Jews
- ANOTHER OPENING
- Index
5 - What If the Other Were an Animal? Hegel on Jews, Animals and Disease
from PART II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- Series Editor's Preface
- OPENING
- PART I
- PART II
- 5 What If the Other Were an Animal? Hegel on Jews, Animals and Disease
- 6 Agamben on ‘Jews’ and ‘Animals’
- 7 Force, Justice and the Jew: Pascal's Pensées 102 and 103
- 8 Facing Jews
- ANOTHER OPENING
- Index
Summary
Opening
Within the history of philosophy the question of the other while not having a purely singular determination appears nonetheless to be a uniquely human concern. Hence engagement with the nature of alterity and thus the quality of the other are philosophical projects that commence with an assumed if often implicit anthropocentrism. Alterity figures therefore within a context that is delimited from the start by an assumption about the being of being human, or at least the approach to human being usually begins with the posited centrality of human-to-human relations. This position is explicit in the writings of Levinas for whom the presence of the other is acknowledged and sustained through a mode of address. He argues that:
Every meeting begins with a benediction [une benediction] contained in the word hello [bonjour]. This hello [bonjour] that every cogito, that every reflection on self already presupposes and which could be the first transcendence. This greeting [salut] addressed to the other man [l'autre homme] is an invocation. I insist therefore on the primacy of the welcoming relation in regard to otherness. [J'insiste donc sur la primauté de la relation bienveillante à l'égard d'autrui].
There is therefore a primacy of relation between humans that is given through the ‘word’. If it were possible to define the absence of the ‘word’ then that absence would describe the animal's presence. Absence or ‘poverty’ would prevail. It is, of course, precisely this prevailing sense of deprivation that, as has already been argued, leaves open the possibility of thinking a form of animal presence that was situated beyond both a founding without relation though equally beyond an attempt to supplant it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Of Jews and Animals , pp. 95 - 112Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010