Lévinas v konfrontaci – Sikora Ondřej, Sirovátka Jakub (2020)

Across thirteen chapters, this book presents a varied range of dialogues between thinkers in the European tradition and Lévinas’s expressive phenomenology of alterity, represented above all by Totality and Infinity. The essays share the aim of reflecting on and further developing Lévinas’s philosophy, conceived as a radical polemic with the major currents of European philosophical tradition. Since Lévinas develops his thought through confrontation, creating sharp polarities, readers of his work are faced with the question of how philosophically justified and fruitful this approach is. The shared focus of the book therefore takes the form of dialogues in which Lévinas is newly confronted with thinkers who significantly influenced his position, as well as with those who, without directly influencing him, consider the same themes from different starting points. The book includes confrontations with Hegel’s conception of the relationship to the other, Kant’s idea of autonomy, Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology and Husserl’s phenomenology. It also contains discussions with thinkers who share motives with Lévinas, such as embodiment in Patočka, relational existence towards the other in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and existence in relation to God in Kierkegaard and Buber. Other themes include difference and negation in Derrida and Adorno, vulnerability in Butler, and mortality and the relationship to language in Blanchot.