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Butler for and against Levinas

  • Cross-Cultural Studies
  • 2025, (), pp.135~161
  • DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2025...135
  • Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Literature
  • Received : October 29, 2025
  • Accepted : December 2, 2025
  • Published : December 31, 2025

Kim Do Hyung 1

1부산대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to examine Butler’s assessment of Levinas. Specifically, it focuses on clarifying where Butler converges and diverges with Levinas’s philosophy, and how her appropriation of Levinasian thought manifests in her own philosophy. Scholars who found important philosophical insights in Butler’s feminism theory and gender theory have expressed deep concern about her focus on ethics and Levinas. They argue that she substitutes ethics for crucial political issues, uncritically adopts Levinas’s concept of the face. So, was Butler duped by ethics or Levinas? No, she is not. Her interest in Levinas merits an effective critique of Enlightenment rationality, more precisely of the atomistic, autonomous subject. What she sought to discover in Levinas was a fundamental orientation toward others, that is, the interdependency among me and the other, among ethics and politics. She aims to extend Levinas’s concept of responsibility into the realm of politics. Thus, Butler grounds the ethics of asymmetry in reciprocity. Whereas vulnerability in Levinas is essentially the subject’s vulnerability to the Other, in Butler it is defined as the common nature of the subject in general. If Levinas sought to argue for the ‘vulnerable subject,’ Butler seeks to speak of the ‘vulnerable humans.’ And through these vulnerable, interdependent subjects, she seeks to devise ways to resolve the unjust forms of inequality accelerated by neoliberalism. So, we can say, borrowing Derrida’s terms, as follows: Levinas did not visit Butler. He was invited by her.

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