Sound not Light: Levinas and the Elements of Thought

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Abstract
Can Levinas’ thought of the other be extended beyond the relation to the other human being? This article seeks to demonstrate that Levinas’ philosophy can indeed be read in such a sense and that this serves to open up a new way of understanding human thinking. Key to understanding such an extension of Levinas’ philosophy will be his account of the face and, more particularly, his claim that the relation to the face is ‘heard in language’. Through explicating what is at stake in this claim, we will work to show how Levinas’ philosophy leads us away from what might be called a tradition of understanding human thought through the medium of light (and hence intellection, theoria, contemplation) and takes us toward a conception of thinking that is conditioned by sound (and hence speech, language, and the sign). In the final section of the article, we consider what such a shift might suggest for the ways we understand thinking (and think of understanding) in both educational and everyday contexts.

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