Levinasian Poiesis and a Feminine Reading of the Concept of Making & Creating: On the Limits of the Poietic Experience in Emmanuel Levinas’s Work and Selected Readings of Bracha L. Ettinger

This article reassesses the limits Emmanuel Levinas places on aesthetics and poiesis, and argues that his corpus nonetheless contains underdeveloped resources for thinking creation otherwise than art’s “shadows.” It then proposes to move beyond these limits through contemporary phenomenological concepts articulated by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (artist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst). The article culminates by bringing Levinas into dialogue with Ettinger’s feminist-phenomenological concepts of fascinum and fascinance. Levinas’s vocabulary of art and creation tends toward fascinum (a petrifying, death-leaning fixation), which constrains his ability to articulate an ethical aesthetics. By contrast, Ettinger’s fascinance, as a prolongation of encounter-time enabling co-poiesis, offers a conceptual lexicon for retrieving Levinas’s fascinance segments and for articulating encounter-events, listening, and creating-together. This movement transforms Levinasian non-reciprocal asymmetry into Ettingerian asymmetrical reciprocity while preserving alterity. This feminist transformation is grounded in Ettinger’s matrixial maternal paradigm, in which subjectivity emerges through carrying and being-carried in relation to an m/Other.