- 著者
-
石井 雅巳
- 出版者
- 日本倫理学会
- 雑誌
- 倫理学年報 (ISSN:24344699)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.70, pp.147-160, 2021 (Released:2021-06-14)
Emmanuel Levinas emphatically reiterates his caustic critique of historiography
in Totality and Infinity(1961). For Levinas, “[historiography]rests on
the usurpation carried out by the conquerors, that is by the survivors,” and to
him, it is a violence of totality that ignores the particularities of the individual
and reduces them into a narrative convenient to the victors.
In this paper, we first take up the text of Totality and Infinity, where Levinas
most explicitly declares his critique of history, and lay out why history is the
violence of totality. In doing so, we demonstrate that both ethics and fecundity
are deployed as resistance to the violence of history. Secondly, we analyze how
Levinas addresses the difficulties that the theory of history in Totality and Infinit
faced, in his later works including Otherwise than Being and Beyond Essence(
1974). We summarize our engagement with the other found in the dimension
of “trace,” focusing especially on discussions of “survival” and “books.” We
then analyze the path of change in Levinas’s strict attitude toward history and
the other in the past.
The outcome of this series of readings that this paper gains is, first, to show
that for Levinas, history and its violence were not just an example of totality to
be critiqued, but an important concern closely linked to ethics. Secondly, by analyzing
his later writings, this paper illustrates that wary of the violence of historiography,
Levinas was seeking a positive relationship with the past and history
and that he was once again grappling with the difficulties of the debate
faced in Totality and Infinity.