The Drama of the Self-Becoming: Transformation of Justice in Levinas’ Ethics

Article

Abstract

[In English]

The article discloses the formation of justice in its connection to responsibility, pain, suffering, pardon and temporality. At stake Levinas’ idea of subjectivity in a modality of one-for-the-other challenged by the appearance of the third party in the face-to-face relation. One of the important emphases is put to the role of an intimate and singularized justice rooted in proximity and τόδε τι, its unique role in forming ethical subjectivity. With the third party subjectivity fully acquires its dramatic changes since doing justice comprises a complexity of ethical responses which slightly move from the ethical to the political and community and then back to the ethical. Here, the main claim is a temporal disjunction of justice in relation to others. The impossibility of doing justice and getting pardon of acts that have had unjustified intentions are described as undecidable just because of its disjointed content.