Otherwise: A reading of Emmanuel Levinas's otherwise than being or beyond essence

Abstract

This study is motivated by the desire to understand Levinas at his most difficult. This desire explains the choice of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence as the almost exclusive guide to my reading. The greatest gamble undertaken by this book is that of linking the fate of the relation to be established between the ethics of responsibility and ontology to the fate of their respective languages: Saying on the side of ethics, the said on the side of ontology.2 It is a bold gamble to the extent that what binds each of these disciplines to its own manner of signifying brings to the fore two difficulties generated by this new way of philosophizing: on the one hand, the difficulty, for ethics, of freeing itself from its ceaseless confrontation with ontology; on the other, the difficulty of finding for the ex-ception that disrupts the system of being, the language appropriate to it, its own language, the said of its Saying. These difficulties are inseparable and are condensed in the word, the adverb otherwise, otherwise than. ... It is, indeed, always necessary to tear oneself away, through the otherwise than . ., from the very thing whose reign one attempts to suspend or interrupt; but at the same time, some linguistic articulation must be ventured for that in the name of which one is conscripted and assured of being able, of having, to pronounce the anteriority of the ethics of responsibility with respect to the "rhythm [train] of being, the rhythm of essence" (though a note on the