The intervention of the other

by David Ross Fryer

"Emmanuel Levinas, French philosopher, was suspicious of psychoanalysis, to say the least. Following Sartre and others, Levinas thought that Freud had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of consciousness, while Levinas's own work celebrated a certain something that could not be contained by thought. Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalyst, was, in turn, suspicious of philosophical ethics: Lacan subscribed to a Freudian critique of ethics as pathogenic, though he did see his own work as fundamentally about a kind of ethics, specifically an ethics concerned with how people live their lives in an already normative society. While the two never engaged with each other's thought directly, Levinas and Lacan were each interested in many of the same questions: What is it to be a subject? What is the subject's relation to the Other? Can the ethical be grounded in a post-foundationalist world? Through close textual analysis, David Ross Fryer brings the ideas of these two seemingly disparate thinke