When I opened, he had gone: Levinass Substitution in light of Husserl and Heidegger

Bettina Bergo
Universit de Montral
(forthcoming in Discipline Filosofiche, I, 2014)
Ist den nicht prinzipiell ein prophetisches Bewusstseindenkbar?
Hua X, 45

Introduction
It is generally admitted that Levinas turned from the conjunction of exteriority,
alterity and the face in Totality and Infinity (1961) toward a deconstruction of the insideoutside binarity in Otherwise than Being (1974). It is not so much that one logic
replaced the other. It is, as Alphonso Lingis argues, that
In Totality and Infinity the relationship with the other was presented as a
contestation of the pure sensibility, in which the ego pursues its own closure and
contentment. Now Levinas actually sets out to see in the exposedness to alterity in
the face of another the original form of openness. It even founds and sustains the
openness to things or to the elements. (Levinas 1991, p. xvi)

The evolution in approaches turns toward a pre-egoic passivity inspired by

Husserls investigation of passive synthesis and transcendental consciousness as the flow
of internal time. But it was also inspired by Jacques Derridas critique of Totality and
Infinity in Violence and Metaphysics; notably, where the latter questioned the
primordiality of the face as pure exteriority, which must appear (even as pure expression),
within the space of light.1 One year after the publication of Derridas long essay,

Derrida writes, Everything given to me within light appears as given to myself by myself. Hence
forward, the heliological metaphor only turns away our glance, providing an alibi for the historical violence
of light: a displacement of technico-political oppression in the direction of philosophical discourse. For it
has always been believed that metaphors exculpate, lift the weight of things and of acts. If there is no
history, except through language, and if language (except when it names Being itself or nothing: almost
never) is elementally metaphorical, Borges is correct: Perhaps universal history is but the history of
several metaphors. Light is only one example of these several fundamental metaphors, but what an
example! Who will ever dominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without first being pronounced
by it? What language will ever escape it? How, for example, will the metaphysics of the face as the
epiphany of the other free itself of light? (Derrida 2005, p. 114 emphasis added).

Levinas published La substitution in the Revue philosophique de Louvain (1968). Out

of this work grew what is arguably the central chapter of Otherwise than Being.2
I propose to return here to this substitution, which should be considered as a
constellation of movements within passive sensibility, including recurrence, obsession,
persecution, and Saying. I am convinced that over the course of their dialogue, which was
both direct and indirect, Derrida came to approach passivity, substitution, and Saying in
terms perhaps less dark than Levinass, as the question of the possibility of a gift and as
the promise made before any promise.3 I will return to this. First, let us examine more
closely the senses of substitution in Levinas. As a return to embodied or incarnate
passivity, open to an other, substitution is my pre-originary susceptiveness (susception
pr-originaire).4 It could be described as an unstable state in which I have received
something whose thematization may pull it into the everyday or the ontic, but whose
implications for intersubjectivity are other than ontic. Levinas also refers to substitution
as a passivity prior to receptivity (Levinas p. 195, p. 213).5 In this sense, it is like a oneway street, starting in a me outside the realm of the phenomenological ego and
expressed through the hermeneutic turn that Levinas placed on affectivity in 1974. Now,
despite his debt to Husserls phenomenology of passivity, this is a decisive departure
from Husserlian phenomenology, effected even while remaining faithful to it (Levinas
2

For an excellent discussion of the evolution of this theme in Levinas, see Robert Bernasconi (Critchley
and Bernasconi 2002, 234-251) and Simon Critchley (1999).
3
See for example Derrida, 1987), 535-95. I will speak, then, of a promise, but also within the promise.
Why can I not avoid speaking, if not because a promise committed me before I even begin to hold the
slightest discourse? If I speak, then, of the promise, I will not be able to take any meta-linguistic distance in
its regard. The discourse on the promise is from the outset [davance] a promise: within the promise. I will
not speak therefore of such or such a promise but of that which, as necessary as [it is] impossible, inscribes
us in its trance within language before language (p. 547, my trans., final italics added).
4
Emmanuel Levinas 2004, pp. 195, 216; Levinas 1991, pp. 122, 138.
5
through the substitution of the one for the other, the foundations of being are shaken or assured, but
this shaking or this assurance does not belong in any way to the adventure of being [ le geste de ltre]
The signifyingness of signification [la significance de la signification] does not work [ne sexerce] as a
mode of representation, nor as a symbolic evocation of an absence Levinas 1991, p. 136; 2004, p. 213.

1991, p. 281. But for that reason, it is as dependent on Husserl as on Heideggers

hermeneutic deformalization of Husserls formal time consciousness. We should
remember that, in Heidegger, Befindlichkeit (mood and affect) and Verstehen
(understanding) are discussed in light of three Vor-strukture (Vorhabe, Vorsicht, and
Vorgriff).6 These imply that, in Heideggers hermeneutics, we are fundamentally open to a
pre-thematic being-attuned or Gestimmtheit.7 I refer to Heideggers hermeneutics here,
because the primary characteristic of the substitution constellation in Levinas, and of the
promise in Derrida, is to find oneself summoned, or invested, without a correlative
possibility of giving back symmetrically. That, too, denotes a Vor-struktur, albeit different
from those Heidegger adumbrated. The point is that the hermeneutic extension Heidegger
proposed to Husserls phenomenology could itself be analyzed in terms of such a gift,8
and it arguably influenced Levinass own re-reading of Husserl in 1974. Nevertheless, in
the 1970s, Levinas has recourse to Husserls passive synthesis, sensation and temporality
in a way that cannot be found in Totality and Infinity. How to understand the crossedreadings he proposed, using Heideggerian hermeneutics to move behind Husserls
transcendental consciousness, and Husserls passivity to criticize Heideggers ontology?
The story is complicated and we shall first have to understand substitution in its relation
to the pre-cognitive Vor-strukture Heidegger proposed.
The hermeneutic deformalization of phenomenology, whether that found in
Heidegger or that, in Levinas, appears to present a complement to phenomenology even
6

Heidegger, 1962, 29: mood amounts to a way in which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all
cognition and volition, and beyond their range of disclosure. Levinas would readily accord him this and
uses this principle in 1974.
7
See Heidegger, Being and Time, 29: Daseins openness to the world is constituted existentially by the
attunement of a state-of-mind [Befindlichkeit], p. 176. And again, A state-of-mind is a basic existential
way in which Dasein is its there.
8
See Heidegger 2008, p. 252.

as it reaches beneath intentionality, the phenomenological ego, and phenomenological

constitution in general (1991, pp. 82; 2004, 177).9 The claims of these hermeneutics are
not relative (any more than Dasein would be).10 In short, Levinass ambition to venture
beyond phenomenology while remaining faithful to ithowever we evaluate thiswas
clearly adopted by several inheritors of Husserl. If Heidegger expanded the
phenomenological resources for description to such an extent that he reinvented his
conceptual lexicon, then Levinas reinvented the style of hermeneutic expression, which
became his privileged way of remaining close to the immediacy of substitution and the
saying or dire.11 Levinas forged a rhythm in the text itself that expressed substitution
like a throbbing of the heart (systole and diastole) (1991, p. 109; 2004, p. 172), and
9

It is not generally claimed that Levinas provides a hermeneutics, say, of alterity in immanence and the
emergence of the subject. One might ask why this should be called a hermeneutics at all. Just as
Heidegger can write, of the temporalization of Dasein as its condition of being a da and an open, time
needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of
temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being (Being and Time, 5), I maintain that a
comparable approach is taken by Levinas in AEAE. Moreover, Heidegger, even in 1927, does not rule out
phenomenology in favor of hermeneutic ontology. Quite the opposite, he writes that for questions that lie
essentially hidden from (the phenomenological) view; i.e., because phenomena, as understood
phenomenologically, are never anything but what goes to make up Being, while Being is in every case the
Being of some entity, we must first bring forward the entities themselves if it is our aim that Being should
be laid bare; and we must do this in the right way (p. 61). Now, the right way, in matters of what does
not show itself, and in matters of what sub-tends beings encountered in everyday life, implies a certain
twist set on Husserls phenomenology: Our investigation will show that the meaning of
phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation (p. 61). The of the phenomenology
of Dasein has the character of a [hermeneuein], through which the authentic meaning of Being,
and also those basic structures of Being which Dasein itself possesses, are made known to Daseins
understanding of Being. The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic (p. 62). It could be argued that
Levinass task is to elucidate the meaning of the subject for-another, as it inheres in a flesh, in a soi
(oneself), and comes to itself through the in-habitation of it by a trace it cannot appropriate nor describe
without imposing a hermeneutic twist on phenomenological constitution. In this sense, Levinass ongoing
investigations of responsibility, and notably of the non-structure and fore-having of recurrence, obsession,
persecution, substitution and Dire, point toward a different hermeneutics: that of our susception by the
good, Later on, he points out: The subject is affected [saffecte] without the source of the affection
making itself a theme of re-presentation. We have called obsession this relation, irreducible to
consciousness (1991, p. 101; 2004, p. 159).
10
For Heidegger, the understanding of Being for a Dasein is philosophically primary and transcendental
knowledge (1962, p. 62). Levinas is comparably making a claim that concerns the possibility of
understanding the emergence of a subject (divided between self-identification and fundamental affective
elements that resist thematization, and simply in-sist, or disturb) that is non-relative, non-relativistic.
11
Compare Derrida, 1986: The promise of which I will speak will have always escaped this command for
presence [requisition de presence]. It is older than I and than we. On the contrary, it makes possible all
present discourse on presence (p. 547, my trans.).

staged the immediacy of speaking as though it were a wound and the passing on of a gift:
At this moment in the text, here I am.12 This sentence is a performative proposed by
Derrida, but I would argue that performatives are a privileged way in which Levinas
shapes substitution into what it is: an engagement never contracted, a promise.
Now, a gesture such as this is possible only if I give it to someone else, even if I
do not choose to do so, and Levinas calls the rhetoric of the saying that arises in
substitution, prophetism, equating it explicitly with le don et la gratitude (1991, p.
149; 2004 p. 234), enacting it as immediacy, and calling it prophetisma term to
which I will return.13
To be sure, the concept of substitution can be explained, but it bears noting that
we find, in both Levinass and Heideggers hermeneutics, opacities around their concepts,
because fore-structures are pre-thematic and because the hermeneutic deformalizations
they add to (classical) phenomenology have the ambition of reaching levels of immediacy
largely unavailable to cognition and discernible only retroactively, when we reconstruct
them as objects of description or analysis.14 For this reason, substitution resists univocal
definition. Notwithstanding, one of its most important specifications is the saying, le
dire, which should be likened to a Stimmung (tonality) and a dissolution of egoic

12

This is the title of an essay Derrida wrote for Levinas (paraphrasing 1991, p. 155; 2004, p. 242): The
very discourse that we are holding [tenons] at this moment on signification, on dia-chrony, and on the
transcendence of the approach beyond being (trans. mod.). Also see Derrida, En ce moment mme
dans cet ouvrage me voici in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. F. Laruelle (Paris : J. M. Laplace,
1980), 21-60.
13
Levinas writes: It is in prophetism that the Infinite escapes the objectivation of thematization and
dialogue and signifies as illit, in the third person; but according to a tertialit different from that of the
third party interrupting the face-to-face welcome of the other man (AEAE, 234, my trans.).
14
Levinas renders retroactive with the expression aprs coup: The one-for-the-otherfoundation of
theory inasmuch as making possible the relationis not what we understand by subjectivit engag. The
engagement already supposes a theoretical consciousness as the possibility of assumingpreviously or
aprs coupan assumption that overflows the susception de la passivit (1991, p.136; 2004, p. 214, trans.
modified, emphasis added).

sovereignty resembling Heideggers intoned openness of Dasein.15 While the dire is

characterized by suffering affects, it explains something like the Vor-struktur motivating
any utterance to the other,16 and it would seem that the dire, like Derridas promise to
speak (1986, p. 547sq.) asks hermeneutics a difficult question: Why is it that being with
others invariably entails some mode of speaking (or silence) as sense-donation, but above
all as sense?17 For Levinas, the answer to that question is the substitution provoked in a
sense by no thing, passive but not synthetic; and so fundamentally de-structured that he
likens it to maternity.18 The dire is in turn accompaniment and precondition of words
spoken, the way what is horizonal to a thematized object allows it to be intended. In
Levinas, it evinces an immediate intersubjective openness that overflows Husserls
passive synthesis called Einfhlung. Much ink has flown on Einfhlung and Paarung
(pairing), and Husserl has been criticized for their formalism.19
15

Signification, that is to say the contradictory trope of the one-for-the-other. The one for the other that is
not a lack of intuition, but the surplus of responsibility. It is my responsibility for the other, which is the for
of the relation, the signifyingness itself of signification in which the Saying signifies before showing itself
in the Said (1991, p. 100; 2004, p. 158).
16
Like Heideggers Mitsein, in which we are speaking even in remaining silent.
17
With regard to sense-exchange, the important point is sense or meaning, which, despite a near infinity of
possible modalizations, redounds to the activity of the transcendental ego. As Husserl maintains in Hua I
(Cartesian Meditations), 36: The universal a priori that belongs to a transcendental ego as such is a form
of essence that contains an infinity of forms, of a priori types, of possible actualities and potentialities of
life, as well as the objects to be constituted in it, as effectively being ( Hua I, 108). Within the
transcendental egounderstood as the overarching unity of time consciousnessmeaning emerges and
unfolds, but is always meaning. As Levinas says, nothing erupts into the ego as fundamentally, or
structurally, alien to it. Such could only be pathology, and pathology serves in Husserl only to demarcate
the forms and boundaries of complex normality.
18
1991, p. 104; 2004, p. 165. And the evocation of maternity in this metaphor suggests to us the meaning
proper to the oneself [soi-mme]. The oneselfis already made of absolute passivity, and, in this sense,
victim of a persecution paralyzing any assumption that could awaken in it to posit itself for itself Tied up
in an irrecoverable time, which the presentdoes not equalnon-convertible into a memory (trans.
mod.).
19
See Scheler (1973, 173). When I make such a statement [Ah, as before a beautiful painting or
landscape], I am not directed toward my feeling-state; nor do I live in one. No matter how many feelingstates may enter into the comprehension of the beautiful and the lovely in those objects, and no matter in
how many ways they may be expressed, they are nevertheless in no way meant in the sense that the
beautiful and the lovely in the things are meant.Likewise, the expression of enthusiasm over a noble
moral deed or the expression of indignation over a base deed, as contained in Phooey, is different in
essence not only from the judgment This is noble or That deed is base, but from the prelogical
comprehension of these qualities ... (p. 173).

In light of the hermeneutic uncover of the prethematic, Levinas ventures beyond

phenomenology rhetorically. The saying of the gift or promise inhabits the gesture that is
the gift. Now, this is where Levinas departs from the early Heidegger, responding to an
unidentifiable (human) addressor rather the way we find enactments in Abraham, Job, or
Jonah (1991, pp. 122, 128; 2004, pp. 194, 204).20 To enact a gift, using the style Levinas
calls prophetism, enacts ethical immediacy. Running alongside the enactment in the text
are phenomenological descriptions of affects that point toward passional states carrying
on beneath the level of intentionality and object-consciousness (1991, p. 111; 2004, p.
177). If his two-level strategy of enactment and description is probative, then Levinass
style participates in a hermeneutic project beyond phenomenology in a way quite
different from Heidegger.
Now, the transcendental phenomenologist might wonder what remains of
phenomenology in such a project. The answer to this may never satisfy him or her. That
said, what I can show here are four basic characteristics of phenomenology that Levinas
had to get around in order simply to think substitution, the saying, (and Derrida, the gift
and the promise). These characteristics of phenomenology include: 1. the formalism of
phenomenological time and the transcendental consciousness. 2. The omnipresence of
meaning in even the deepest layers of passivity. 3. The supposedly solipsistic
constitution of social existence via a transcendental reduction, and 4. the epistemological
tone of an ethics that flows from the previous three characteristics. Levinas is serious
20

Speaking of prophetic signification, Levinas writes, To be suremy responsibility for all can and has to
manifest itself also in limiting itself. It limits itself in bearing witness, returning the gift linguistically,
through words said (le dit). In this passage, Levinas refers to the adventure of Jonah in light of bearing
witness to suffering.
Derrida ventures: When Jeremiah curses the day he was born, he must again, or already, assert [affirmer].
He must rather confirm, by a movement neither more positive than negative, for it does not arise from the
position (thesis) or from de-position (privation, subtraction, negation) (Derrida 1986, p. 562, my trans.,
last italics mine). This confirmation is another way of referring to the eccentricity of prophetic
signification.

when he says he remains faithful to phenomenology. His deformalization, while

hermeneutically indebted to Heidegger, derives so powerfully from Husserls
phenomenology that Levinas is doing more than damning his teacher with faint praise
when he claims that his work, in all faithfulness to Husserl, ventures beyond it. But there
is no substitution without the propedeutics of Husserls intropathy, pairing, time, and
passive synthesis. So, if we cannot answer frontally what remains of phenomenology in
Levinas, we can and should spend some time showing how and why Levinas rethinks his
teacher; for, if substitution, as pre-originary susceptiveness and the dire, makes no
sense to us, then the idea of Derridas promise and the question of a unilateral gift will
not be plausible.
In short, substitution is Levinass trope for responsibility, not unlike Derridas
promise. He enacts it rhetorically. . Substitution is intimately tied to pre-thematic affect,
and it argues that Husserls ego-monad, even if it admits windows, is notprimordial in the
question of subjectivity. The destiny of Levinass philosophy has been tied to its
indemonstrability. It has neither the heuristics of pathology that Gestalt psychology21 and
psychoanalysis have (Levinas 1991, p. 146; 2004, p. 228), nor can it rest satisfied with its
propositions: it must unsay the Said. Why go to such lengths for a promise or for ethical
responsibility? The question asks nothing less than whether phenomenological
philosophy can hear the voice Levinas calls prophetism, which is bearing witness to
the interests of the other. Four interrelated Husserlian themes irrevocably influence
Levinas and motivate his hermeneutics of affects and intersubjective openness that would
be more immediate than Husserls Einfhlung and Paarung (empathy and pairing, both
passive syntheses). I will address each of these points in order, and show how Levinass
21

A privileged way by which Merleau-Ponty addresses the multiple layers of what he calls la perception.

rethinking of them contributes to the necessity of substitution as the hermeneutic

extension of phenomenology.

First Theme: Time and Transcendental Consciousness

The first difficulty Levinas had to overcome was the formalism of
phenomenological time, defined by Husserl as transcendental consciousness. Formalism
was intimately tied to difficulties Husserl confronted around the meaning of sensation.
Although, in the still sensualist Logical Investigations, Husserl did not consider sensation
as intentionality per se,22 by the time consciousness lectures (1905-1909), sensations role
in the constitution of the flow of time would open new difficulties. Husserls originality
had been to describe consciousness as evenly temporalizing without reference to an
Archimedean point outside of inner time. For him, the flow of time integrated stable
temporal events protecting their respective chronological positions (yesterday, three days
ago, twenty minutes ago). This integration was due to the eidetic and threefold quality of
time consciousness as now moment (or primal impression), retention, and protention.
Although he would later multiply his diagrams of time,23 it remained that the basic
structure of Husserls time and transcendental consciousness could be schematized as a
right triangle with now-moments flowing both backward and downward, such that their
order was determinable even as retained past moments accompanied ongoing perceptions
now (1969, pp. 92-93). Husserl described this formal shape as a rectilinear multiplicity
(orthoiden Mannigfaltigkeit),24 because the flow was unidirectional and plural. There are
no breaks in times flow and no events eccentric to its totalization. Inner time is
22

In 15b (Husserl, 1984), adds a note that makes it clear that, at that time at least, sensation admitted of
variations in intensity, whereas intentionality could not do so.
23
James Dodd, 2005.
24
Also see Hua X, Beilage I, Urimpression und ihr Kontinuum der Modifikationen, p. 99.

transcendental, the condition of possibility for constituting anything, because

everything lived fits into timebetter, is time temporalizing. Moreover, any attempt to
inspect it entails fixing a moment or object whose scrutiny immediately shows that the
flow of time continues on as if behind the object fixed by our phenomenological gaze.25
Most striking in Husserls rethinking of time was the importance of an idea called the
now moment [Jetztpunkt]. While never distinct from the flow, each new now
contributed to ongoing time-phases by stretching retentionally into previous now
moments.26 Husserl called this a new originary sensation (Hua X 31). Of course,
sensations are ongoingly modified, whether we notice it or not, and it is fair to say that
they come from a body within a world (Ideas II). Without presuming to define a body or
a lived flesh (Leib) here, note that sensation, through its variations, feeds the feeling of an
ongoing flow.27
In order to do this, sensation must reach consciousness; it must indeed
intentionalize.28 This opens an old problem concerning the relationship between bodies
25

This opens the Neo-Kantian question of whether we have access to time consciousness or not.
Husserl write: But every new now is also something new and is as such characterized
phenomenologically.[O]nly the present instant is characterized as actual now [Jetzt], and this as new, the
preceding instant has undergone its modification this continuum of modifications in the apprehension
content engenders the consciousness of the extension of the sound, with the continuous sinking down
[Herabsinken] of what is already extended in the past, (1969, p. 65). The now moment is thus punctiform
and admits continuous flowing back, preservation of sense, and a certain stretching.
27
In the Ideas II and III, Husserl argues that the rhythm of sensation determines the rhythm of times flow,
although this does not imply there is a fast- or slow-rhythm time within a universal time. It is all one time,
unified, and integrating homogenously its retentions and sedimentations. Thanks to M. Ramstead for this
citation.
28
Also see Franck, 2001, citing Husserls Ideen I: Sensation is the presentative consciousness of time. If
the originary time consciousness is sensation, then only the analysis of the latter will permit an ultimate
determination of the concept of constitution. And again in Ideen II, where Husserl observes: The entirety
of a mans consciousness is, in a certain way, tied to his flesh (Leib) through its hyletic basement ( 39,
cited by Franck, p. 33), which allows Franck to develop an argument concerning drives in the body:
phenomenology cannot describe its center (Urhyl) [though] its most proper sense escapes its jurisdiction.
The indeterminacy of the concept of constitution is not contingentbut necessary and irremediable. It
attests to an original facticity or again the impossibility of a constitutive phenomenology of the flesh (pp.
33-34). Writing of the flow of time as absolute subjectivity in the Time Consciousness lectures, Franck
reminds us that Husserl referred to this flow as an image (36), not unlike a stream that arises from an
originary source point, continually renewed in its activity. But such permanent, ongoing processuality
pleads for the intensivity of transitive sensation (Franck, 119) or again something like a force or drive
26

10

and consciousness, and Levinas will examine this closely in an essay entitled
Intentionalit et sensation.29 In that 1965 essay, Levinas argues that, as the ground of
intentionality, as the font of transcendental consciousness, sensation is already a spiritual
thing for Husserl. Because it does not come from nowhere, however, sensation must be
accorded its due as bodily and preconscious. Thus, Levinas argues that Husserls now
moment involves something that is older and younger than the instant of the
[Urimpression] to which the retentions and protentions, constituting this unity, are tied
(1982, p. 155).30 Sensation is older than the now moment, because once we become
conscious of it, it has already been modified in becoming conscious. Yet, relative to
intentional consciousness, it is younger than the now moment because it is unfolding in
the flesh before it even reaches consciousness. This allows Levinas to deconstruct the
spiritual claim, quoting Husserl saying that the Urimpression is non-ideality par
excellence the passage from nothing to being ([or] to a being that will modify itself
into being-for-consciousness, but will never be lost) genesis spontanea (1982, pp.
155-56; 1969, p. 100). Now, the structural peculiarity of sensation in light of the
threefold now moment allows Levinas to ask whether there is not a time or processuality
implicit in affectivity even before the unfolding of sensations takes definitive shape in
characterizing the dynamism of the absolute flow. Of course, this does not expand the problem of a life (or
drives) that underlies intentional consciousness and explain the famous genesis spontanea of the flow.
Levinas will allow that phenomenology can follow the turning [retournement] from thematization into anarchy in the description of the approach: ethical language comes to express the paradox in which
phenomenology abruptly finds itself cast; for ethics, beyond politics, is at the level of this reversal. Starting
from the approach [of the other], [phenomenological] description finds the neighbor carrying the trace of a
withdrawal that sets it up [lordonne] as a face, 1991, p. 121; 2004, p. 192 (trans. mod.). Thus, while
ethical language (utterly opposed to a formal ethics) suggests this reversal, phenomenology can, within
the limits of its thematization, follow the approach of the other but only to the point where it must speak of
a trace.
29
Levinas 1982.
30
For Levinass argument for an affective dimension that does not fit into Husserls tripartite, unified
temporality, see 1991, p. 104; 2004, p. 164 : Its [oneselfs] disquiet also does not translate some dispersion
into phases, the ones outside the others, in a flow of immanent time, in Husserls sense, retaining the past
and biting onto the future (trans mod.).

11

intentionality.31 A argument comparable to this is found in Heideggers description of

Befindlichkeit, which, as mood, accompanies understanding and is what I receive from
the past, a claim very different from Husserls point that anything to do with affects
belongs to higher-level constitutions. Levinas writes, the mystery of intentionality lies in
the gap between (1982, p. 156); that is, the gap between preconscious and conscious
sensations. Levinas will make this mystery into the question concerning the dynamism
of affects that do not make sense but return as unstructured suffering. All this is absent
even in the mature Husserl, for whom nothing really escapes intentionality, and all
sensation is intentional.32

Second Theme: Passive Synthesis and a Synthesis that does not Produce Meaning
Between 1918 and 1926, Husserl took extensive notes on passive synthesis,
retaining the threefold structure of transcendental consciousness but integrating
affections, affective tendencies, forgetting, and a phenomenological preconscious. For
Husserl, affections and affective tendencies denote forces able to awaken or attract
the attention of the ego. In his chapter on association, Husserl asked two questions: How
is it that I have a perception of an object as unchanging over time; second, How is it that
thingsfrom places to implements to ideasbecome associated? A given experience that
flows back in time consciousness amounts to a retention that progressively loses clarity
of content and affective force. In this seeping out or paling, the retentions ability to affect
31

As Levinas writes in chapter IV, La substitution: Subjectivity as consciousness is thus interpreted as

[the] articulation of an ontological event, as one of the mysterious paths wherein its adventure of being
unfolds. To be a theme, to by intelligible, or open, to possess oneselfall of this is articulated in the course
of essence.in starting from sensibility, interpreted not as knowledge but as proximityin seeking in
language, behind the circulation of information that it becomes, contact and sensibility, we have tried to
describe subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness and to thematization (1991, pp. 99-100; 2004, p. 157,
trans modified).
32
See Husserl, 1974.

12

me by calling my attention to it is diminished.33 Yet the very possibility of association

depends on retentional sedimentation and passive synthesis. That is, a perception retained
might arise spontaneously as if from nowhere, provided some trace of it carried
residues of affective force liable to be reawakened by a new perception. Arguing that
these object syntheses resembled Kants figurative synthesis (Husserl 1966a, p.164),
Husserl specified that object connections were grouped according to similarity and
contrast, as well as to sensuous properties (sight, sound, touch). Important for us is that
affection, which is none other than the force some memory has to awaken our attention,
runs all along the connections (1966a, p. 164), and only if there is some affective force
can association occur, whether by contrast or resemblance. Affective vitality should thus
help us to decipher the enigma of association and, by the same token, any enigma of the
unconscious and of the changing becoming conscious [Bewutwerdens] (1966a, p.
165).
Within Husserls overarching project of constitution, passive synthesis makes the
living present always already meaningful (cf. Husserl 1973, p. 112), just as it permits
memories to erupt gratuitously in the midst of conversations and other activities
(1966a, p. 122). But all this concerns an un-consciousness or what Husserl called a
phenomenology of what we call the unconscious (1966a, p. 154). To be sure, the work
of passive synthesis concerns consciousness intimately and the Unbewut of which
Husserl speaks is not Freudian. The point is that the present owes it meaning to affective
forces and to bridging retentions (Brckenglieder), which are themselves a special
synthesis by resemblance (1966a, p. 123).
33

That does not mean that retentions do not extend very far back. Husserl even wondered whether the
plasticity of retentionstheir ability to stretch into the pastmight not go so far that they never entirely
dissolved. He would subsequently abandon this hypothesis, see Husserl 1966a, 37, p. 177.

13

Yet affectivity, tied as it is to something like an excitation or an ability to awaken

attention, is hyletic, fleshly, and may admit a different approach. Abandoning object
constitution, Levinas pursues a different question: what if we were to examine the return
of certain affective forces which present us with no object? Indeed, what if
intersubjectivity and the fact that I see a gaze before I see the color of the eyes gazing at
me (as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre also understood) left a metaphoric trace on me that was
itself so highly charged affectively that only the affect returned in a sort of repeating
pattern similar to the returns of a traumatic dream? This seemingly irrational project of
tracing embodied sensation and affective forces as if back behind the synthesis that
makes sense of the present is motivated in Levinas in part by Heideggers hermeneutic
treatment of Befindlichkeit and his rejection of the formalism with which Husserl
approached intersubjectivity. The ir-rational project will open onto Levinass concept of
substitution, understood as a passive opening to the other, affectively charged, which
precedes and accompanies speaking to him or her, as Derridas gift and promise also do.34
Substitution would thus be a paradoxical synthesis where no object was synthesized.
This steps outside the logic of Husserls passive synthesis, but not out of embodied
passivity. In this way, substitution, like Befindlichkeit, is prior to reflection on giving and
receiving, on what is owed or due. Those are situated at a different level.

Third Theme: The Solipsistic Constitution of the Social

Husserls Notes on Intersubjectivity span the period from 1905 to 1935. In the
group, etc., in the form of associations of persons in communication (1973c, p. 479).
34

Derrida 1986, p. 561: Thus, at the moment at which the question How not to speak? (how to avoid
speaking), it is already too late. It was no longer a question of not speaking. The language has begun
without us, and we, before us; this corresponds to the temporal structure of the gift, similar to that of
Levinas.

14

Husserl was aware that we do not simply constitute the other person: it is also
manifestly possible that the experience take place in such a way that that of which the
experience consists as such opposes itself to the ego, emits an appeal (1973c, p. 462).
However, in his radical strangeness, the otherlike the socius that constitutes me
psychologically and physically before I ever constitute itescapes the domain of
phenomenological constitution. Husserl noted, It is thus necessary to proceed here to
clarifications concerning the way in which a world for everyone is born in the infinity
of egoic coexistence (1973c, p. 464, emphasis added). In short, if everything is
constituted by transcendental consciousness, then can I effectively and without remainder
constitute the myriad levels of a social world that was there before I was born and made
me possible (not to mention to the other who, in her strangeness, is also there)?
Husserls clarifications turned on the forms of passive synthesis that he called
Einfhlung and Paarung. Through empathy and pairing, my monad, open to the other
through communication and analogous constitution, can open further to a common
community and ultimately to a common world. I cannot expand my discussion of this
here, but suffice it to say that we see new, Hegelian influences on Husserl in these
remarks. This leads Husserl to enlarge his earlier conception of transcendental
consciousness, moving it to a new absolute consciousnessunfolding as a unity over the
course of a shared history, communication, and culture. Persons are not isolated insofar
as they have in themselves a tie. There enters into habituality the fact of being the ones
for the others, of the ones being intermingled in the others, of coinciding the ones with
the others, of participating in a volitional unity of several heads (1973c, p. 479). It is
from there that constitution proceeds on the ground of empathy and communication

15

toward ever larger subjective assemblies until it reaches toward one humanity within the
total humanity (1973c, p. 478). This ontological form leads Husserl to rethink
transcendental consciousness in light of a new problem: a transcendental consciousness
that would be meta-subjective, not so unlike Hegels absolute Spirit (1973a, p. 16).
Of course, this constitution proceeds from the monad and, while it goes far indeed
toward explaining how I come to be in a shared world, early critics of Husserl deemed it
solipsistic, while others argued that his was a vaster conception of consciousness than
mere solipsism.35 The limits of the intersubjective reduction lie in the question of my
dependence on the other prior to the full blown emergence of my thematizing
consciousness. For one like Merleau-Ponty, the natural attitude or my fundamental
perceptual faith may contain more than even Husserls intersubjectively reduced
consciousness.36 In any case, Levinass step outside phenomenology is precisely to
underscore this dependence independently of any developmental psychology.

Fourth Theme: The Formalism of an Ethics of Renewal

This brings us to theme four, in which the formalism of Husserls ethics arises
from the scope and peaceable quality of empathy and constitution. There is little
possibility for thinking deeply about suffering and substitution in my constitution of the
other, understood as the Husserlian alter ego. We might say, on the other hand, that
Levinas integrates suffering into substitution so powerfully that, as affect and mnemonic
trace, substitution amounts to a virtual violation of the ego.37 This violence is not
35

For the solipsistic position, see Seifert, 2009. For an anti-solipsistic position, see Zahavi 1999.
This also comes close to Schelers final, critical position with regard to transcendental phenomenology.
See Scheler 1973a, p. 316.
37
Compare this conception of the trace with Derridas: [As o]rder or promise, this injunction [speak!]
engages (me) in a rigorously asymmetrical fashion even before I might have been able, myself, to say I, and
to sign, to reappropriate it for myself, to reconstitute the symmetry, such a provocation. That in no way
36

16

Hegelian, it is tied not to the work of the negative but to the fact that the other remains
opaque to me despite empathy and even despite Husserls synthesis of pairing.
Now, there is in Levinas a structural isomorphism between the alienness of the
other, their free action in my regard, and the strangeness of other groups or
communities.38 Not that Husserl was unaware of foreign groups, but an approach to
conflict, if it is not to proceed from the stance of an external, third person-observer as in
Hegel,39 must overflow what I am able to constitute of the others behavior and
perceptions. There are important consequences for ethics in this. Let us first listen to
Husserl himself on empathy and violence: the situation of actual reciprocal empathy
may again contain different modalities. I have an experience of the other, and this, in an
immediate foreign perception, in an immediate empathy. The same goes for him vis--vis
me (1973c, p. 471). This does not mean that we are transparent to each other.
Nevertheless, if I am alert to the other and active, then I am occupied with him to
understand explicitly what he announces [Bekundungen]immediately in his
perceptual carnal reign (1973c, p. 471). This can even include his inner violence, his
expenditure of energy, eventually his psychic excitation in the vehemence [Heftigkeit]
of the movement of his arm while striking (1973c, p. 471). But that is where
vehemence largely stops in Husserl.
Even when he rereads Hegels master-slave dialectic, Husserl constitutes the two
parties in struggle as the will of the master penetrating into the consciousness of the
attenuatesmy responsibility. There would not be responsibility without this coming-forth [provenance] of
the trace, [or] if autonomy were first or absolute (1986, p. 561, my trans).
38
See Levinas, 1969, Preface, where being is equated with violence (pp. 22-25, 304-306). Before that, in
Libert et commandement (1953), Levinas writes: What characterizes violent action, tyranny, is the fact
of not facing that to which the action applies. We would say more precisely: the fact of not finding it facing
or as a face [de ne pas lui trouver de face], of seeing the other freedom as a forceof identifying the
absoluteness of the other with his force (my trans., p. 39).
39
I refer, here, to what is his double reading, that of the unfolding of reason in itself and for those
experiencing it, as opposed to the same process as its unfolds for us. See Hegel, 1977, 83, p. 53.

17

servant. It is as though the syntheses permitting analogisation of consciousnesses

proceeded too quickly to fusionality and sedimentation, and too little on the basis of
contrast, impenetrability, and spontaneous unforeseen impacts: The will I have to fulfill
the demand of the other is, at present, no longer merely my own inner will, butmy will
is one with the other (1973b, p. 402, emphasis added). Of course, to reach this
situation, I first posit the existence of this foreign subjectivity (1973b, p. 402). There
can be no penetration of his will into mine if I do not spontaneously grasp much about
him as a subject. But for Husserl that only begins from an act of positing. It does not do
so in Levinas, and we might argue that positing the existence of the other has already
ruled out the force of his otherness, and anything like Levinass paradoxical synthesis
in which no thing is synthesized (1991, p. 101; 2004, p. 159). That is the intrinsic power
and limitation of Husserls phenomenology.
In the matter of ethics, his monadology and the primacy of intentionality and
constitution lead Husserl to questions of the good in light of the renewal of human values
as eidetic truths. In his five articles for the Kaiz magazine, written between 1922 and
1925, Husserl argued that Western culture was in crisis.40 This crisis implied the loss of
its very ground with the ascendency of technicity, and concealed the humanist truth
intrinsic to the West. The only path back for European humanity was to ground the notion
of the good life in a new way, mobilizing rationality and freedom toward an eidetics of
the good. This was as true for the individual as it was for personalities of a higher order
because, for Husserl, there exists a natural feeling of analogy between man and his
40

Husserl, 1988, pp. 3-124. In section one, he writes that the first World War revealed the inner untruth,
senselessness of European culture. He asked, Should we wait, for this culture, not by itself in its
accidental play of value-constructing and value-destroying forces [Zufallspiel wertzeugender und
wertzerstrender Krfte] [to become] healthy? Should we put up with the Decline of the West as a fact
[hanging] over us? (p. 4).

18

community (1989, p. 51). We have already seen this at the level of transcendental
subjectivity.41 In light of this analogy, phenomenology posed us the challenge of directing
ourselves rationally and freely. That is, beyond the sway of irrational forces, whether
these were drives or external factors (1989, pp. 42-43). Husserl placed full faith in the
work of reason and in a truly rational life-practice [Lebenspraxis] (1989, pp. 86, 105,
109) for the construction both of a new ground of science and ethics, understood as the
vision of higher values. There is not space here to summarize the Kaiz essays. Suffice it
to say that the discussion of an eidetics of ethics requires exploring empathy and social
acts, but above all two essential reciprocities: the first, between the individual and his
community; the second, between myself and the other.
In this condensed summary of Husserls thought on ethics, I am arguing two
things. First, that Husserls conception of a good life and of practical reason flows
seamlessly from his conception of transcendental consciousness, of intentional
constitution, and finally, of the reductions, whether eidetic or intersubjective. Second, this
is the education Levinas received from him; this is the phenomenology to which he
remained faithful in 1974 even as he ventured beyond it. We have already seen how
Levinas contested the totalization of time consciousness and the arguments about
meaning in passive synthesis. We can sense, too, that the opacity of the other contests the
primacy of a general inter-egoic reciprocity and leaves a place for the priority of the
social in regard to constitution. But most urgent is the deformalization, the deintellectualization of ethics. There is neither substitution nor gift in an eidetics of the
good life based on reciprocity. Let me now address specifically each of these points in
light of Levinass innovations.
41

Here, as this is adumbrated through the intersubjective transcendental reduction.

19

Levinass Hermeneutic Innovations

First, transcendental consciousness, time and sensation: in the wake of Nietzsche
and Bergson, we may well claim that we do not know what time is. For Husserl, time
was an ongoing synthesis, consciousness essential temporalization; rectilinear,
sedimenting, indissociably threefold. Substitution in Levinas is thinkable only if we
return to the problem of sensation and ask whether the expansion of the flesh and with it,
of sensibility, does not also open a question about time as recurrence or repetition. It is
not my concern to debate whether this is still time; debates like that involve supposing
that we already know what time is.42
Second, passive synthesis and the omnipresence of meaning: there is no question
that for consciousness, intentionality carries degrees of meaningfulness. But are meaning
and sense the last word on an embodied consciousness? How can this do justice to the
experience of suffering? Levinas ties pre-originary passivity, susceptiveness, directly to
substitution, to the recurrence and obsession that are suffering, especially in cases where I
am not suffering from a disease or a physical wound. In light of that, some memories may
provoke suffering. But this seems to be the case only if some memories refuse to return in
a comprehensively meaningful form. That is why we go to therapists and seek narratives
and words to stabilize our pain. In my view, substitution is inspired by a radicalization of
Einfhlung beyond constitution and analogy. Substitution rests on Levinass argument
that sensation, whether thermal, gustatory, or olfactory, is not primordially a knowledge
of pain, taste, [or] scent. It can incontestably take on this signification as a discovery by
42

If the time consciousness lectures identified the universal flow with transcendental consciousness, then
Husserl will speak in 1928 of the transcendental Ich as the universal domain of all possible forms of lived
experience, evincing essential temporal laws for the regulation of these experiences by coexistence and
succession. See 1973, pp. 107-108.

20

losing its proper sense, in becomingconsciousness of (1991, p. 65; 2004, p. 105). But
that is not its first or proper sense. For the embodied being that lives its body, is born
from a body, and nurtured by bodies, Einfhlung must be radicalized to reach this fleshly,
pre-intentional leveleven if that level can only be performed. Both Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty seem to grasp this clearly. For Levinas, the pre-intentional is never cut off
from the intentional, but its specificity does not lie in intentionality. That is why it is preintentional and not non-intentional. Substitution is what it is because it is hermeneutically
intersubjective. It is intersubjective because I first receive my experiences of a flesh
through opaque others.
Contesting intentionalization through passive synthesis, such that sensibility does
not make sense at every level, Levinas attempts to hold his arguments at a bodily
hermeneutic level, which of course puts him in the contradictory position of thematizing
what is pre-thematic. Heideggers Vor-strukture preceded him in this.
But Levinas glimpsed something new. In Husserls formalism, he found a way to
conjoin the exploration of the pre-intentional with intentionality by abandoning the
foundational ambitions of his teacher.43 This implied integrating corporeal dimensions
like fatigue, lassitude, hunger, and aging as feelings and processes (1991, p. 66; 2004, p.
107). All of this has both a subjective and an intersubjective dimension, although it is the
intersubjective that counts here, because substitution means that in being I, I am also, at
times, other to myself (1991, p. 118; 2004, p. 187). Whether we make this the
43

Husserl maintained that even that to which I am not paying attention at a given time might be intentional.
For example, the back of the room, which we ignore while writing at our desk, is intentional in the sense of
co-given with the desk, the floor, and the walls. It is striking the extent to which Husserl, in mid-career,
expands intentionality becomes enlarged beyond the mere noetic aiming. Levinas would counter that only
through an interpretive approach to embodiment, in its circuit with world and others, can we get to the
lower degrees of intentionality that he calls pre-intentional. This is a debate whose outcome ultimately
depends on our approach to sensibility. See Husserl 1988, 92, for a discussion of attention and modes of
actuality and inactuality.

21

phenomenon of a history or a psychology, or even an interpretative phenomenology,

counts less, ultimately, than that we recognize that the totalization made possible by the
meaningfulness of Husserls passive association does not sufficiently explain suffering
and violence. In this near poetic return to a domain, Befindlichkeit, opened by Heidegger,
Levinas argues: Recurrencewould be the ultimate secret of the incarnation of the
subjectprior to any reflection, to any apperception, [as if there were] an
indebtedness before any borrowing, not assumed, anarchic [This amounts to] the
passivity of traumatism, but of a traumatism that forbids its own representation (1991, p.
111; 2004, p. 175).
If substitution essentially means that, at the level of sensibility and passivity, I
carry a trace of an other within myself that I cannot synthesize into a thought or an object,
then that is traumatism only if I have thereby been traumatized. But substitution seems
larger and less psychologically overwhelming than traumatism. It is meant to denote a
process, without explicit structure, that is proper to living flesh. Traumatism, on the other
hand, does not happen to everyone, and seems to me an intensification of substitution that
underscores how deep and how vulnerable our embodied being-with others is. I do not
have an answer to the relationship between traumatism and substitution. But I believe this
is why Derrida, in pondering the gift, circumvented Levinass traumatic register, focusing
instead on a promise through which I respond, but which I made to no one. Indeed, rather
than focusing on Levinass attempt to dismantle time consciousness and inquire into the
sources of passive syntheses, Derrida focused on the origin of dialogue.44 Starting from
Levinass couple, le Dire and le Dit, Derrida suggested that the dialogical origin of
language lies in a gift whose giver is no longer present, a gift I have no choice but to pass
44

Derrida 1986, pp. 535-595.

22

on. This clarifies and somewhat simplifies Levinass argument. It flows from it, but states
more clearly a question with which we should be concerned here: can there be a gift that
does not lapse into an economy of exchange and what I-owe-the-other?
The answer may be yes, provided we abandon what Jean-Luc Nancy once called
archeophilism45 or the conviction that a discourse, to be a bona fide logos, must be
attached to a principle that can be made evident.46 Archeophilism characterizes the spirit
of Husserls formalism and the basic target of Levinass criticism.47 Even if nothing
radically heterogeneous appears to the consciousness we place between transcendental or
intersubjective brackets, the distinction between natural and reduced consciousness has
an abyssal quality, here, insofar as what I know about the other through natural
consciousness (for example, suffering) may not be the result of something like
transcendental empathy and pairing. Everything in Levinass approach to substitution
suggests that there would be, underlying natural consciousness and its affective states, an
abiding trace or impact tied to the ongoing performative aspect of intersubjectivity, and
taken at the level of the interweaving of sensation and emotion. In this respect, a
reduction that serves the purpose of transcendental constitution, at whatever level it is
carried out, overlooks that level of sensibility: recurrence, obsession, and originary
susceptiveness to the suffering called the other-in-the-same. Therein lies the heart of
substitution.

45

See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1989, pp. 191-209.

Levinas writes, Irreducible to consciousness, even if it overturns itand thus betrayed, but thematized,
in a said [Dit]obsession crosses consciousness contre courant, inscribing itself in it as foreign: as
disequilibrium, as delirium, undoing thematization, escaping the principle, the origin, the will, the arch
that is produced in every glimmer of consciousness (1991, p. 101; 2004, p. 159, my trans.).
47
It is in a responsibility justified by no prior engagementin an ethical situationthat is sketched the
meta-ontological and meta-logical structure of this Anarchy, undoing the Logos in which the apology is
inserted.we recognize, under these traits, persecution (1991, p. 102; 2004, p. 162, my trans.).
46

23

References
Bernasconi, R. 2002: To which Question is Substitution the Answer?, in S. Critchley
and R. Bernasconi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, pp. 234-251.
Critchley, S. 1999: The Original Traumatism: Levinas and Psychoanalysis, in S.
Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary
French Thought, London, Verso, pp. 183-197.
Critchley, S. and Bernasconi, R. (eds.) 2002: The Cambridge Companion to Levinas,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Derrida, J. 1980: En ce moment mme dans cet ouvrage me voici in F. Laruelle
(ed.), Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, J. M. Laplace, pp. 21-60.
_____. 1987 : Comment ne pas parler : Dngations, in Psych: Inventions de lautre,
Paris, Galile, pp. 535-395.
_____. 2005: Writing and Difference, (trans.) A. Bass, London, Taylor and Francis.
Dodd, J. 2005: Reading Husserls Time-diagrams from 1917-1918, in Husserl Studies
21, 2, pp. 111-137.
Franck, Didier. 2001: Dramatique des phnomnes, Paris, Presses universitaires de
France.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1977: Phenomenology of Spirit, (trans.) A.V. Miller, New York, Oxford
University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962: Being and Time, (trans.) John Macquarrie and E. Robinson,
New York, Harper and Row.
_____. 2008: Letter on Humanism, in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Basic Writings, New
York, HarperCollins.
Husserl, Edmund. 1966: Zur Phnomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917),
Husserliana X, Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1966a: Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis, Hua XI, Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1969: Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstesens (1893-1917), Hua X,
Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.

24

_____. 1973: Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortrge, Hua I, Den Haag,
Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1973a: Zur Phnomenologie der Intersubjektivitt: Texte aus dem Nachlass.
Erster Teil: 1905-1920, Hua XIII, Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1973b: Zur Phnomenologie der Intersubjektivitt: Texte aus dem Nachlass.
Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928, Hua XIV, Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1973c: Zur Phnomenologie der Intersubjektivitt: Texte aus dem Nachlass.
Dritter Teil: 1929-1935, Hua XV, Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1974: Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen
Vernunft, Hua XVII, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1984: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil. Untersuchungen zur
Phnomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Hua XIX, Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1988: Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen
Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einfhrung in die reine Phnomenologie. Hua IIIII, Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1989: Fnf Aufstze ber Erneuerung, in Aufstze und Vortrge (1922-1937),
Hua XXVII, Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and Nancy, J.L. 1981: Le people juif ne rve pas in A. and J.-J.
Rassial (eds.), La psychanalyse est-elle une histoire juive? Colloque de Montpellier,
Bnai Brith, Paris: Le Seuil.
_____. 1989: The Jewish People Does Not Dream, Stanford Literature Review, 6, pp.
191-209.
Levinas, E. 1953: Libert et commandement, in P. Hayat (ed.), Libert et
commandement, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, pp. 27-48.
_____. 1961: Totalit et infini, Essai sur lextriorit, Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff.
_____. 1969: Totality and Infinity: Essay on Exteriority, (trans.) A. Lingis, Pittsburgh,
Duquesne University Press.
_____. 1982: Intentionalit et sensation in En dcouvrant lexistence avec Heidegger et
Husserl, Paris, Vrin, pp. 145-163.
_____. 1991: Otherwise than Being, or: Beyond Essence, (trans.) A. Lingis, Dordrecht,
Kluwer Academic Publishers.

25

_____. 2004: Autrement qutre ou au-del de lessence, Paris, Editions de poche.

Scheler, Max. 1973: Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New
Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, (trans.) Manfred S. Frings and
Roger L. Funk, Evanston, Northwestern University Press.
_____. 1973a: Selected Philosophical Essays, (trans.) David R. Lachterman, Evanston,
Northwestern University Press.
Seifert, J. 2009: Discours des mthodes: The Methods of Philosophy and Realist
Phenomenology, Berlin: De Gruyter/Ontos.
Zahavi, D. 1999. Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation,
Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

26