ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how Emmanuel Levinas handling of the language of the body maps the limits of philosophy’s capacity to address the question of pain and suffering. It explores the nature of Levinas’s revolt and its potential for transgressing the limitations of traditional philosophical discourse. In the superficial reading of the passage, the concreteness of bodily weight is, for Levinas, a cause of suffering – the biological envelope of the body appears to Levinas as a straightjacket which holds him fast, causing pain. Levinas thus situates laziness and fatigue at the very heart of the problematics of being and therefore at the forefront of his philosophical intervention. Levinas says that the only way to grasp the instant of one’s coming into existence is to turn to experiences that precede conscious thought, reflection, and attitude. The impulse of self-mapping that Levinas isolates in the experience of laziness is the haptic sense of proprioception.
