ABSTRACT
Emmanuel Levinas’s doctoral thesis was titled The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Before World War II, Levinas moved to Paris and began teaching at the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale. For most of his career, Levinas remained a relatively obscure philosopher, known primarily for his essays on the Talmud and interpretations of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Levinas’s critique of phenomenology, especially Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein, is a critique of Western philosophy as a philosophy of “totality.” Rather than thinking “totality,” the same, or being, Levinas thinks ethics and alterity. Levinas’s ethics has been subjected to several critiques, not only by Jacques Derrida but also by Alain baoidu in his polemical text Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Levinas calls for an art criticism of the “interval” to deny the “essentially disengaged” position of art, which “constitutes, in a world of initiative and responsibility, a dimension of evasion”.
