Emmanuel Levinas's Aesthetic Consciousness

Emmanuel Levinas is widely known for his polemical stance towards art. Especially in his earlier writings in the 1940s, he famously calls into question its ethical potential. In this article, I analyse some of Levinas’s early writings in order to answer the following questions: How does Levinas understand the nature of art, and how does this understanding allow him to criticise it, often in harsh terms? I turn to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of aesthetic consciousness, which I argue shares similarities with Levinas’s stance on art. I argue that re evaluating Levinas’s stance allows one to tackle topical issues of aesthetics from the viewpoint of his ethical philosophy. Through showing how Levinas’s aesthetic consciousness hinges on a problematic relationship between conceptual truth and art, and through emphasising the role of criticism, I suggest that Levinas’s thought can be utilised in approaching contemporary questions of the autonomy of art and aesthetics.