On the Significance and Evolution of the Philosophy of Levinas

Abstract

Levinas’ first major work Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961) is concerned with the ethical meaning of what is often called ‘intersubjectivity’. Although Levinas does not much use this term, it shall here refer to his notion of the ethical relationship of the I and the other person. For Levinas, this relationship is by essence recalcitrant to the kinds of understanding sanctioned by systematic philosophies. It is for Levinas a relationship whose beginnings are pre-representational and pre-conceptual, and whose effectivity is experienced prior to the operation of cognition and understanding. Although the I-other encounter, in its specific lived actuality, stands as the excluded term in the Western philosophical tradition, at least up until the last century, that encounter is of importance to this forgetful tradition because in it resides a significant aspect of the “life” which the tradition sought to thematize.

“But the problem is that one can ask if a beginning is at the beginning, if the beginning as an act of consciousness is not already preceded by what could not be synchronized, that is, by what could not be present, ... if an anarchy is not more ancient than the beginning and freedom.”

Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence