Abstract

Levinas' critique of economic models of justice, especially as developed in his later work, was tiedto Plotinus and to an idea of the divine as a trace of presence and not as a productive force---God's overflowing, in other words, is not the production of meaning, but the constant withdrawal that keeps us from ever feeling securely at home. Levinas uses this idea of the divine to counter Heidegger's ontology of place, and the rootedness of experience. Derrida in his turn contests Heidegger's ontology by developing a conception of meaning based on the dispersion of traces, or uncontrollable forces or effects, instead of seeking a unifying ontological ground for all possible meaning. In order to clarify the shared basis of these two critiques of Heidegger's ontology, the dissertation follows the conception of dispersion through Plotinus and specifically the trace of the Good---that sensible contact with the overflowing presence of divine intellect that imbues form with its transcendent force. ;For both Levinas and Derrida, the irrecuperable singularity of contact with the other---or the divine---is captured in the figure of a trace. The form of singularity, however, has less to do with Plotinus than with authors out of the German Idealist and phenomenological tradition. The dissertation turns, correspondingly, to an examination of the form of singularity in a subject's contact with the sensible world in Kant and Hegel. This is the form of aesthetic contact, and the resulting emphasis on form causes artistic production to take on a weight in relation to the specifically human faculties of intelligence that it did not have in Plotinus. In conclusion, the different ontologies of sensible contact with the world are restated as problems of aesthetic form. In turning toward an example from minimalist art, we see the force of presence associated with simple geometric shapes; the art carries the weight of form without being an embodiment of a concept of the beautiful