A SUBJETIVIDADE COMO OUTRO NO MESMO SEGUNDO LEVINAS: A OBRIGAÇÃO DE OCUPAR-SE DE OUTREM ANTES DE PERSISTIR NO PRÓPRIO SER

Abstract

This article is aimed to investigate the notion of subject in Emmanuel Levinas, a concept that occupies a central place in his philosophical perspective. The Lithuanian-French philosopher questions the primacy that the Self has achieved in philosophy, criticizing the sovereign role attributed to ontology in the course of Western history. Such a matrix of thought, linked to the scope of knowledge, promoted a reduction of the Other to the domains of the Same, subtracting and ignoring the space for otherness. The path taken by Levinas in analyzing the subject has as its starting point an atypical concept of “being”, judging it as intertwined with evil and as having an excessive character, therefore configuring a scenario that demands evasion. On the escape route from ontology, Levinas phenomenologically analyzed concrete everyday experiences and elaborated the intriguing notion of the Il y a, that is, the presence of the depersonalized irremissible existent. The emergence of the existent was thought – in its primary condition – through hypostasis, when the existent starts to relate to the existing. However, the definitive break with the Il y a and the integral constitution of the subject have their place in the encounter with the Other, in the proximity of the face, with the subjectivity being thought of as hospitality, as “one-for-the-other”, according to the prescription contained in the face of the neighbor, in the form of responsibility, infinite and non-transferable, for everything and everyone. The epiphany of the face establishes the absolute precedence of the Other, taking us to a domain older than that of ontology, that of the pre-original ethical sphere, a context in which subjectivity, breaking with the idea of the subject as an essence, presents itself as substitution for the other man.