Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins

Abstract

Levinas radicalized Heidegger’s hermeneutic moods into intensely embodied states and affects, pointing toward their intersubjective connections. His early work challenged Heidegger’s intellectualist approach to affective tonalities, arguing that our experience of “Being” occurs in bodily modes, from nausea to shame to escapist pleasures. Following his famous treatise on welcoming the “Other” in 1961, he turned to theorize the experience of alterity as first affective; and thereafter in 1974 as anxiety and emotional memory (“the other-in-the-same”). Taking a step outside Husserl’s phenomenology, he located the birth of responsibility for the other in the intersubjective interweave of our lived bodies and affects, and later on as mourning and mnemonic obsession. Since Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy (1923), Levinas’s was the greatest effort, since Kant’s practical reason colored by Achtung, to underscore within phenomenology the connection between specific affects and ethical responsibility.