The Erotic/Aesthetic Quality Seen from the Perspective of Levinas’s Ethical An-archaeology

Abstract

This paper emphasizes the place and the role of the aesthetic quality and the role of the erotic in Levinas’s project that deals with ethical an-archaeology. Despite Levinas’s categorical statements that there are irreconcilable differences between ethics and aesthetics, i.e. between ethics and the erotic, above all, it is emphasized here that these differences do not represent a stark or sharp contrast, but quite contrary, they often constitute a subversive ontological element. On the other hand, somewhat unexpectedly, with its ethical anti-aestheticism Levinas’s “noncontemporary” thought appears to be, at the same time, both significant and critical, elementary, emancipatory and contemporary in relation to present-day reactionary reactualization and revitalization of the aesthetic quality which mechanically proceeds to develop on the margins of Levinas’s emancipatory past.