earticle

영어

The Levinasian way of presenting the ethical difference between the self and the Other (a human as the absolutely other) is essentially linked with the quest for the knowledge of the unknowable, God, but in a radically different way from onto-theological methodologies traditionally accepted in the West. Heidegger claims that philosophy has run its course, and that the task remaining for the thinker at the end of philosophy is to think what really presents the presence of the present of beings. Yet Heidegger faces a dilemma as he speculates on what makes possible the presence in terms of the truth　and unconcealment of the truth, which still are words of logocentrism. Derrida claims that the other is an alterity that exceeds the ontological account of the alternative of presence and absence. But Derridian deconstruction fails to acclaim the particular otherness of a human as the Other. Levinas, in claiming that there is the ethical dimension between the self and the Other, definitely goes against the grain of entire tradition of Western philosophy, which he defines ontological. In this Levinasian light, the task of a literary criticism is to catch the overflowing of finite thought of a given literary work directed toward the infinite, and this work would be to trace the alterity of the text by questioning the totalizing theme of the text.