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Carrol Clarkson

Embodying “you”: Levinas and a question of the second person

In this paper I examine the effects of considering Levinas’s philosophy of the relation to the Other as a relation to a second person “you,” rather than to a third person “he.” To think of the Other as “you” sheds further light on the ethical encounter that Levinas terms the “Saying:” it provokes us to think of the event of reading a literary text as an event of the Saying. In the dynamic potential of the literary text to instantiate an “I” and a “you” (which is to say, an addresser and an addressee) each time it is read, and in ways that cannot be exhaustively predicted or epistemologically saturated in advance, the artwork effects an open yet responsive encounter with the Other.

Journal of Literary Semantics, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0341-7638
Volume: 34, 10/2005
Pages: 95 - 105

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