The Problem of embodiment in the early writings of Emmanuel Levinas

ENCristian Ciocan’s essay on corporeality follows the development of the early Levinas around a number of key concepts close to the theme of embodiment. For Ciocan, three of these are especially rich: in order, (1) Levinas’s account of subjectivity, in terms of attachment to self and struggle to be, paves the way for (2) a phenomenology of nudity as exposure and of shame as fault without guilt, which in turn highlights (3) the tender allure of the flesh that Levinas famously associates with the feminine. And the feminine of course becomes his paradigm for alterity. Indeed it would not going too far to suggest that Levinas’s early accounts of a corporeal relation with an other person whose flesh precipitates the movement of eros anticipate much of what is essential to what later texts call “proximity.”.