“What Sensation Does for Levinas and Deleuze,” Lecture by Tom Sparrow, Northwestern, Nov. 14
The After-Life of Phenomenology Workshop
sponsored by The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
“What Sensation Does for Levinas and Deleuze”
––Abstract––
It is often thought that phenomenology and poststructuralism represent two divergent paths out of modernity. One way to construe this divergence is to take phenomenology as the path of transcendence, while poststructuralism represents the path of immanence. If anyone is a philosopher of immanence, we are told, it is Deleuze. If anyone is a philosopher of transcendence, we are told, it is Levinas. This talk aims to show–by examining the unlikely alliance of Levinas and Deleuze–that such neat distinctions obscure the points of convergence that exist between phenomenology and poststructuralism. In their aesthetics, Levinas and Deleuze share a lot in common, especially when it comes to the functions that sensation, representation, force, and violence play in aesthetic experience. Furthermore, given his approach to aesthetic experience, this investigation raises the question of whether or not Levinas can even be called a phenomenologist.