Abstracts

David Allen (Bio) and Agata Handley (Bio)

Levinas and the Ontology of the Shadow: From Participation to Obliteration

Emmanuel Levinas’s early essay Reality and Its Shadow has often been read as a dismissal of art—with much-cited phrases describing it as “monstrous and inhuman,” or artistic pleasure as “nasty, selfish and cowardly.” Yet such readings overlook the essay’s deeper philosophical intent: not an anti-art polemic, but a meditation on the ontology of the image and its entanglement with time, resemblance, and death.

Levinas’s central concern in the essay is less with aesthetic value than with the way art reveals a condition of derelict time—l’entre-temps—in which being is immobilized, and the subject appears as its own image. This shadow realm is not illusion, but a structural duplication of reality: a resemblance that replaces, haunts, or exposes the real.

In both Reality and Its Shadow and the 1957 essay on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Levinas discusses the concept of participation as a form of embodied, emotional experience beneath conceptual thought. Later, in Totality and Infinity, participation becomes the very structure from which ethics must break. Yet this shift still does not amount to a rejection of art. What links Reality and Its Shadow with later reflections such as On Obliteration (1988) is a continued concern with the image as trace—a remainder that reveals fragility, vulnerability, and the interruption of presence, through small, passing gestures or “shadows”: the backs of people waiting in line in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, or the hand or arm in a sculpture by Rodin. In the stillness of the image, we glimpse not only the failure of mastery, but a fragile opening to the ethics of hospitality—a visitation, a haunting encounter with the trace of the Other.