Intolerable otherness (I). The transcendental intolerance of the ego according to Husserl
Renaudie, Pierre-Jean
Intolerable otherness (I). The transcendental intolerance of the ego according to Husserl - 2022.
72
Levinas often made clear his admiration for the founding father of phenomenology. Yet the relation of filiation between Husserl and Levinas seems to end at the very moment when phenomenological analysis steps into the domain of intersubjectivity and meets the question of the other. Like many disciples and readers of Husserl, Levinas constructed his analysis of otherness out of the failure of the fifth Cartesian Meditation, in its blatant incapacity to establish an authentic relation to the other. However, it is possible to propose another reading of this fifth Cartesian Meditation, and of the experience of the stranger that Husserl sets out to interrogate and to describe. Beneath the reduction of alterity to the ego, which constitutes the meaning of the other and sets the measure for it, what is at stake in these analyses is for Husserl to make sense of the irreducibility of the subject’s separation, based on which it experiences its life in the first person. The unsurpassable intolerance of the ego, incapable of considering the other without inevitably bringing it back to itself in order to constitute it as its double, may then take on a positive meaning: it is no longer a matter of the last stumbling block of a constitutive phenomenology on its last legs, incapable of taking into account the question of otherness, but rather the starting point of a new way of thinking about the relation to the other, to which Levinas will give its full measure, as Chiara Pavan’s paper in this volume demonstrates.
Intolerable otherness (I). The transcendental intolerance of the ego according to Husserl - 2022.
72
Levinas often made clear his admiration for the founding father of phenomenology. Yet the relation of filiation between Husserl and Levinas seems to end at the very moment when phenomenological analysis steps into the domain of intersubjectivity and meets the question of the other. Like many disciples and readers of Husserl, Levinas constructed his analysis of otherness out of the failure of the fifth Cartesian Meditation, in its blatant incapacity to establish an authentic relation to the other. However, it is possible to propose another reading of this fifth Cartesian Meditation, and of the experience of the stranger that Husserl sets out to interrogate and to describe. Beneath the reduction of alterity to the ego, which constitutes the meaning of the other and sets the measure for it, what is at stake in these analyses is for Husserl to make sense of the irreducibility of the subject’s separation, based on which it experiences its life in the first person. The unsurpassable intolerance of the ego, incapable of considering the other without inevitably bringing it back to itself in order to constitute it as its double, may then take on a positive meaning: it is no longer a matter of the last stumbling block of a constitutive phenomenology on its last legs, incapable of taking into account the question of otherness, but rather the starting point of a new way of thinking about the relation to the other, to which Levinas will give its full measure, as Chiara Pavan’s paper in this volume demonstrates.
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