AddALL.com - On Escape: De l'evasion (Cultural Memory in the Present) 0804741409 9780804741408

First published in 1935, On Escape represents Emmanuel Levinas s first attempt to break with the ontological obsession of the Western tradition. In it, Levinas not only affirms the necessity of an escape from being, but also gives a meaning and a direction to it. Beginning with an analysis of need not as lack or some external limit to a self sufficient being, but as a positive relation to our being, Levinas moves through a series of brilliant phenomenological analyses of such phenomena as pleasure, shame, and nausea in order to show a fundamental insufficiency in the human condition.

In his critical introduction and annotation, Jacques Rolland places On Escape in its historical and intellectual context, and also within the context of Levinas s entire oeuvre, explaining Levinas s complicated relation to Heidegger, and underscoring the way Levinas s analysis of being riveted, of the need for escape, is a meditation on the body.