Nietzsche and Levinas

Nietzsche and Levinas require that we work for a future beyond our own lives, exploring our unique sense of a pre-philosophical ethos and justice in thinking through the other. This book invites us to move through and beyond the affirmative ethics of both thinkers to become advocates for the highest evaluation of ethical sensibility that returns us to a pre-philosophical wisdom which punctuates each moment and questions the justice of all thinking. Nietzsche’s Dionysian interruption of subjectivity in a compulsion to ethos, and Levinas’ notion of a non-indifference to others refer us to the trace of an ethical encounter with another beyond cultural self-justification. Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Levinas’ divine comedy of transcendence evoke expansive senses of affirmatory ethos, becoming unique loci for "the good" on earth. Nietzsche’s will to power in an eternal recurrence of the same and eternal return and Levinas’s thought of il y a and illeity are interruptive events which test of our capacity to engage in the wisdom of the affirmation of life. These proposals are developed in the advocacy of the provision of a sanctuary space for ethics and justice in which the affirmation of life questions our right to a place in the sun.