A resistência à mística em Emmanuel Lévinas

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate Emmanuel Levinas’s resistance toward mysticism. The Levinasian argument regarding mysticism acquires the character of a philosophical argumentation starting from the theme of subjectivity and reaching its apex within the context of the reflection about language and metaphysical desire. The originality of the discussion that arises from the Levinasian resistance toward mysticism is that it has contributed to the confluence between metaphysics and ethics. Lévinas´s rupture with the main categories of the metaphysics of mysticism led him to elaborate an ethics beyond the modes of philosophies influenced by it. Lévinas´s distancing himself from mysticism in his major philosophical works plays an essential role within his philosophical thought because, without this distance, it would be impossible for him to trace a radical separation between the “I”, the infinite and others. In Totalité et Infini, Autrement qu´être ou au-delà de l´essence, and De Dieu qui vient à l´idée ethics is separated from mysticism. For Lévinas, there is neither a return to, nor participation in, nor union with the One. There is, instead, revelation of the infinite in the manner of an ambiguous shine in the human face.