Abstract

Levinas's defense of ethical subjectivity provides a fruitful alternative to the accounts of subjectivity offered by either modernism or post-modernism. The modern conception of the subject, on the one hand, promotes the autonomy of the subject, but it neglects the importance of the social, cultural, and economic conditions in which the subject is formed. The post-modern conception of the subject, on the other hand, acknowledges the conditioning influence of the concrete world, but in so doing, it runs the risk of annulling the possibility of ethical responsibility. Can the subject be de-centered but yet retain a sense of agency necessary for ethics? Levinas's account of ethical subjectivity solves this problem by showing that the subject is at once de-centered and ethically responsible. Here ethical responsibility is a heteronomy which emerges in the relation to the other person. I show that the other person both de-centers the subject by calling its freedom into the question and holds the subject accountable for its freedom by provoking a reflection on freedom