Lévinas: metafora stvaranja
Levinas:The Metaphor of Creation

Summary/Abstract: Lévinas was a first-hand witness to the 20th century Nazi horrors perpetrated during the Holocaust. The quantity of evil produced in the Nazi camps brought into question the capacity of institutions to embody ethics. The institutional failure was symptomatic of a wider crisis of the political and the rational exemplified by the Holocaust atrocities. Lévinas perceived the condition as a linear regress into the primordial formless void referred to as tohu wa'bohu. To the de-created world of the 20th century mythologically submerged under “darkness” and “emptiness,” Lévinas responded through ethics of creation. Namely, Lévinas used the phenomenological procedure of creation to form a new world of the interpersonal. Lévinas’ creation of the interpersonal was carried out through the potent metaphor of the “face” figuring as a privileged phenomenological metaphor. Considering the privileged status of the “face” metaphor in Lévinas’ “phenomenology of creation,” the “face” suggested itself as a proto-metaphor and the singular force of creation. Employing the metaphor of creation, Lévinas has thus shown „how ethics creates and re-generates the world“ of the post-war society.

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