Arendt, Levinas and a Politics

of Relationality
By Anya Topolski
By bringing Hannah Arendt’s politics into dialogue
with Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics, this book develops
an approach to the political that is relational,
inclusive, and empowering.

June 2015 | PB £24.95 9781783483426 | HB £75.00 9781783483419 | eBook £24.95 9781783483433

“This persuasive and passionate book stages a long overdue encounter between Arendt’s
notion of plurality and Levinas’s ethics of alterity, in order to construct an affirmative
politics of relationality that is richly informed by the Judaic. Working beyond categorical
differences between politics and ethics, Topolski presents this ‘post-foundationalist’
relationality as a moving commitment to hope in divisive and dangerous times.”
– Seán Hand, Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick
Born in Eastern Europe, educated in the West under the guidance of Martin Heidegger and
the phenomenological tradition, and forced to flee during the Holocaust because of their
Jewish identity, it should come as no surprise that Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt’s
ideas intersect in an important way. This book demonstrates for the first time the
significance of a dialogue between Levinas’ ethics of alterity and Arendt’s politics of
plurality. Anya Topolski brings their respective projects into dialogue by means of the
notion of relationality, a concept inspired by the Judaic tradition that is prominent in both
thinkers’ work. The book explores questions relating to the relationship between ethics and
politics, the Judaic contribution to rethinking the meaning of the political after the Shoah,
and the role of relationality and responsibility for politics. The result is an alternative
conception of the political based on the ideas of plurality and alterity that aims to be
relational, inclusive, and empowering.

Anya Topolski is a FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Ethics, Social and Political
Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
 Contents:
Introduction: In Search of a Politics of Relationality | Part I: Bridges and Breasks│1.Biographical and
Philosophical Intersections│ 2. Divided by Disciplinary Confines │ Part II: On Hannah Arendt│3. The Political:
From Ashes to Hope │ 4. An Ethics from Within the Political │ Part III: On Emmanuel Levinas │ 5. Levinas’
Ethics of Alterity | 6. A Politics from Within Ethics | Part IV: From Plurality and Alterity to Relationality | 7.
From Arendt and Levinas to Relationality | 8. The Promise and Pitfalls of Relationality

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