ABSTRACT
From the album's unforgettable musical landscapes and its deeply philosophical lyrics to its cover artwork and its signature spoken asides, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon offers a sustained ethical vision predicated upon goodness and Levinasian notions of alterity and otherness. Reading the album in terms of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophies of otherness and alterity provides us with an illuminating system for understanding Pink Floyd's ethical stance. As Jill Robbins observes in Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature, Levinasian ethics 'denotes the putting into question of the self by the infinitizing mode of the face of the other'. With The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd's ethical imperatives include an expansive analysis of the self's relationship to the larger worlds in which one live, as the ways in which those worlds impact the self's capacity for enjoying goodness and comprehending otherness.
