ABSTRACT
Levinas often returns to a paradigmatic scene of ethicsa scene of feeding a stranger the bread from one's own mouth. This image is fundamental to Levinas's philosophical reflections in Otherwise than Being, and it recurs as paradigmatic of the ethical event in Levinas's subsequent work. Enjoying ones bread is a figure for living from the world as the subject of enjoyment, and giving this bread to another is Levinas's preferred narrative for describing the transformation of the subject of enjoyment into ethical subjectivity, called forth in this regard by the approach of the other person. This chapter explains the account of those factors that promote the inclusion of animal recipients within taka gift-of-the-body narratives. It analyzes those aspects of Levinas's phenomenology of ethical subjectivity through which the effacement of the animal is sustained even at the level of the subject awakening to ethical responsibility.
