Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility

Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995) is widely considered one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the last century. Renowned for his thesis that ethics is first philosophy and his concepts of the ‘Other’ and the ‘face’, Levinas thematizes teaching as central to his conception of subjectivity. While his writings in this area continue to gain influence within broad aspects of educational theory, their political relevance has been somewhat overlooked.

Levinas, Subjectivity, Education examines how the philosophical writings of Levinas lead us to reassess the concept of education, paving the way for a new understanding of ethical and political responsibility. Offering a new interpretation of Levinas’s philosophy that addresses the importance of the figure of the teacher in his writing, Anna Strhan demonstrates the challenge of his work for contemporary debates on autonomy, marketization, and political subjectivity in education. She draws also on Levinas’s writings on religion - both to analyse its practical implications within religious education and to consider how this philosophy relates to his pedagogy. By broadening the interpretive aspects of Levinas’s educational writings, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education sheds important new light on the on-going relevance of one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy.