The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment

Reading texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, David Michael Levin continues his questioning of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of our culturally dominant mode of perception, using vision and the philosophical discourse vision has generated as the site of thinking critically about the moral and political culture in which we are living. In a series of independent essays that focus on specific texts of each thinker, Levin examines their respective challenges to “ocularcentrism” and the political vision they imply. In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, in one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing the prospects for a radically different lifeworld.