The necessary silence for recollection: the woman on the threshold between being and non-being

Abstract

Levinas’ ethics assumes the woman or the feminine as discrete alterity. The decision to choose one of the terms can open to different interpretations about the attribution of this otherness, and, because of that, a huge interest was caused in feminist theorists about Levinas' philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir was one of the precursors of the criticism of the degradation of woman as Other, and Luce Irigaray, in some way, continued it. To understand how these criticisms imply in the constitution of a subjectivity offered to Otherness, we decided to initiate by analyzing the place that woman occupy in the ethics of Levinas. We will discuss from the perspective of the separation between being and existent, with the intention of characterizing the constitution that supports an acceptance of a radical otherness, we begin by taking the woman as the silent otherness, whose intermediate position between being and non-being becomes the condition for recollection, and therefore indispensable for an ethical relationship. Then, we will present some questions that orbit around the notion of feminine employed by Levinas.