Some questions for future research on Jankelevitch, Levinas, & femininity/gender

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     I’m tidying up a paper on Jankelevitch, Abbate, musical ineffability, and implicit understanding. In the course of reading Jankelevitch, I came up with a ton of questions about his relationship to Levinas…questions which are waaaay beyond the scope of the paper I’m working on right now. So, in order to put them aside for now while I finish up the projects I’m presently committed to, I thought I’d post them here…both for my future reference but also to get any feedback anyone might have. If anyone is interested in putting together a panel on Jankelevitch/Levinas for, say, SPEP 14, I could be interested in that. Or, if any musicologists are interested in putting together a panel for future AMS-type conferences, I’d be happy to be your token philosopher 🙂


1.    Is Jankelevitch’s distinction between saying and doing comparable to Levinas’s conception of the saying and the said?
2.    Does Jankelevitch’s book bridge Levinas’s early concept of the ethical Other as feminine with his later concept of the ethical other as time? (In other words: What happens when we think Jankelevitch’s MI alongside Levinas’s “Diacrhony & Representation”? What are the similarities and differences between their critiques of and alternatives to ‘representation’?).
3.    How is the role of the feminine in Jankelevitch related (or not) to the role of the feminine in Levinas? How can this analysis of the feminine connect Jankelevitch’s “musical” ethics to Levinas’s ethics?
4.    How does Jankelevitch’s work help us think about the sonic dimensions of Levinas’s work?
5.    Given differences in the politics of the discipline of musicology and the politics of the discipline of philosophy, how does the feminist approach to “drastic” knowledge respond in each case?
6.    Jankelevitch & Abbate emphasize that the drastic is ineffable because it is processual and mainstream Western philosophical epistemes are objective (beings over becoming, so to speak). Is the sonic just one metaphor for “process,” or is it a particularly helpful/powerful/evocative one? Do these sonic metaphors help us think process in ways that other metaphors don’t open up or encourage?