英文摘要 |
This paper aims to explore how the self in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics retains individuality and reconfigures humanism in the postmodern age. In the ethical relation, the self, pre-consciously obliged by the irreducible and overwhelming Other, is vulnerable and passive. However, the ethical self depicted by Levinas neither corresponds to Jameson Frederic’s notion of “death of the subject” nor Deleuze’s “normadic subject,” characterized by the provisional or contingent state of being. Instead, the self asserts its individuality by bringing up new possibilities in the ethical responsibility for the Other. Without presupposing self-centeredness or any innate essence, the self’s individuality is established in spatialized time. Diachrony is the concept Levinas applies to depict the inevitable confrontation with the nonthematizable Other. It is a dissymmetrical and incommensurable relation with the Other, and the awakening of the self to its radical passivity and vulnerability. However, this passivity does not designate inertia or stasis. It is a state in which, confronted with the Other, a demand is issued that the self be ethically responsible. Paradoxically, the responsibility demonstrates the split of the self into the passive “me” in the Other-confrontation and the active “I” in response to the Other. In addition, this ethical responsibility precedes the freedom through which new possibilities are evoked. Nevertheless, that freedom neither corresponds to any universal reason as Kant contends nor implies an innate quality to be asserted. It is the ability to act now in response to the Other, in a sense remaking the self as new possibilities are registered in the recognition of the self. It is, hence, the registrations of these new possibilities that reconfigure the humanism in the postmodern age. Therefore, Levinas’s ethics, marked by the irreducible and overwhelming Other, does not end up with the self dissolved or diminished to a mere contingency, but confirms a reconfigured humanism derived from an elaborate re-examination of the self’s radical passivity and responsibility. |