Chiasms and contacts: Aesthetic experience in Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the tension between ethics and aesthetics in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Although he displays a certain wariness toward any aestheticisation of existence, Levinas does not refrain from invoking artistic and literary figures, often precisely at critical junctures in his work, those moments in which he seeks to articulate what exceeds both ontological discourse and the activity of the transcendental subject. Starting from the concepts of world and exoticism, and moving through the dimension of language, this study seeks to establish a dialogue between poetics and ontology, with the aim of showing how art can give voice to that which resists the subject’s totalising movement. From this perspective, the aesthetic gesture does not merely evoke alterity, but safeguards its enigma – its irreducible polysemy, resistant to any reduction to a univocal, and thus ideological, mode of feeling. Ultimately, the ethical significance of art lies in the preservation of the Other; yet here alterity is understood, in the first instance, as a transcendental principle: it arises primarly all as a restless question dwelling within the subject, which – if heeded – may suggest the ethical possibility of feeling otherwise.