Please join us at 5pm on Monday, March 18 in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Ranana Dine

PhD Candidate, Ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School

An Obligated Sight:

Vision in Emmanuel Levinas, Mara Benjamin, and Joseph Soloveitchik

Jewish thought is known for its focus on text and textuality, and in some cases, for an antipathy towards the visual and art. In this paper I turn to three seminal authors in Modern Jewish philosophy – Emmanuel Levinas, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Mara Benjamin – to argue that Jewish notions of obligation, a key concept in Jewish philosophy, require a conception of obligated sight. Although these three authors disagree about the nature of Jewish obligation – where it stems from and how it operates – they all agree that obligation is an embodied phenomenological reality of Jewish life. Therefore, they all have articulations of the way sight operates in a world of obligated bodies, even if they are unaware of or ambivalent to the prevalence of vision in their own accounts. The way one sees and what one sees, how one interacts with visual objects and understands visual experiences, are understood and made sense of through a lens of obligation for these thinkers. Considering Jewish vision as obligated vision gives is a powerful insight for doing Jewish ethics, particularly for doing Jewish ethics with visual objects and artwork.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: sight): RDineObligatedSightStandalone-1