Despre subiect(ul) care nu poate fi decât „altfel”: Lévinas – o etică a imposibilului

Abstract

About (the) Subject that Can Only Be “Otherwise”: Lévinas – an Ethics of the Impossible
The present study examines the attempted radical transformation of the hermeneutics of the subject and ethics in post-phenomenological thinking, with a focus on the meta-ontological project of Emmanuel Levinas' heterology. The project just mentioned brings to light the violence inherent in the phenomenological gesture of the constitution of meaning, whereby alterity (the otherness) is blurred and limited to a simple intentional correlate. In opposition to this reductionist tendency, Levinas proposes a radical reconceptualization of the subject - not as an autonomous center of knowledge, but as a fundamental openness and vulnerability to the Other. The study explores the dimension in which alterity does not arise after the constitution of the subject, but rather precedes it and makes it possible in a paradoxical way. This anteriority of the Other establishes an ethics that can no longer be founded on autonomy or free decision. Responsibility becomes infinite and non-founded, an original structure of existence, which pre-emerges (pre-empts) any conscious choice and in which any apparently neutral act is already ethically marked (infused), revealing the impossibility of a pure presence or an innocent gesture (ethical void). Classical ontology is thus re-read as already ethical, insofar as any attempt at totalization excludes and violates radical alterity. The proposal that emerges, consequently, is that of a meta- or pre-ontology that we have tried to define by the phrase "the ethics of the impossible", in which the subject appears as off-centered, fragile and always exposed to an ethical demand that it cannot completely satisfy. This ethics does not begin with the moral decision, but with the very existential condition of being in and through the (constitutive, pre-original) relation with the Other, configuring a responsibility without conditions, which thus fundamentally redefines our understanding of morality and subjectivity.