In the same broad context, Husserl speaks of passing into each other (ineinander) as overlapping (Deckung).
The Sensible Constitution of Subjectivity in Totality and Infinity
Levinas will still use a deliberate analysis and begin his description of the face in a rather phenomenological way as a. This last, apparently aporetic expression indicates a deliberate structure that exceeds, but does not cancel out, the asymmetry of the face. Levinas sees the same kind of primal intentionality in the ethical relationship of the face.
This conscious pursuit enables Levinas to locate the presence of the other in the subject. The idea of infinity, the infinitely more contained in the smaller, is produced concretely in the form of the relationship to the face. And the idea of infinity alone maintains the exteriority of the other with regard to the same in spite of this relation.
It is the intentionality of the original life of subjectivity in its relation to the exterior. Thus, in the final chapters of Levinas' discussion of the face, it will become clear that the face leaves open the prospect of a subjective will. The singularity of the face-to-face relationship does not precede the intersubjective experience in the sense in which a fundamental relationship, once established, requires a manifestation in the social.
It places the event of the face concretely in a series of real and unrelated encounters of particular individuals. The third party looks at me in the eyes of the other—language is justice. As pointed out above, the intentionality of the face does not evoke the presence of the other in the perspective of formal givens.
The others are present in the other because the primary meaning of the face preserves the absolute asymmetry between me and her. The temporal indeterminacy of the face, in this sense, requires a radical transcendence that comes from outside. The identity of the subject is not the end in which infinity is inscribed.
The Ethical Reconstitution of Subjectivity in Levinas and Husserl
For Levinas, Husserl's "transcendence in immanence" can only be maintained as a residual status of the ego in its relation to its lived experience. The ego is this silent state of self-presence in which the order imposed by the infinite supremacy of the other can never reverberate irreducibly. This state of "sleeping and not sleeping" can be discerned within the purity of the ego.
In the stage of reduction, the ego is overtaken before it is “immediately converted into activity” (OB, 142). It circulates within “the wicked infinity of the Sollen” (OB, 142) and continually settles into a theme that immediately merges with the phenomenal how of identification. The reduction is the reduction of the saying to the saying beyond logos, beyond being and.
It is a doubling of the ego's passivity, "a sign of its very signifyingness, an expression of exposure. It remains on the "border of dethematization [...] as a modality of the approach and contact" (OB, 47). This "openness" to the other that Levinas identifies as the "apophansis" of meaning is therefore already a certain form of closeness.
If, as Levinas assures us, the immediate "reflection" or doubling of the ego's passivity is not. Levinas finds the reason for the primary distinct status of Husserl's conception of subjectivity precisely in the latter's notion of the living present of the ego (lebendigen Gegenwart). The self-reflection of the ego as ego is a state that precedes this ego's temporal perception.
It derives entirely from the otherness of the other, distinctly perceived in the aporia of diachrony as both absolute. In Illeity, the other is irrevocably excluded and configured within the immanence of the subject. The infinity of repetitions of the same goal-setting (Zielstellung) can never pass to the Illeity of another.
The Problem of Communication in Levinas and Husserl
Even in the bottomless depths of the radical age, Husserl – the philosopher and the person – could not tear from the body of the ego the correlate that never belonged: the world and language. One of the turning points in the exposition of Other than Being is marked by the procedure of 'reduction' already discussed. The “methodological” ones introduced this. It is this discovery that will lead Levinas to outline a primary language modality whose function cannot be reduced to the identification of the 'axis-structure'.
The flow of internal time consciousness must return “on the other side of the understanding activity or passivity” (OB, 43). That is, we reduce the aspect of understanding and retain the sensual content of the temporal field. Husserl does not regard the intentional grasp of a transcendent object as an immanent intentional content.
What is the point of convergence between Husserl's suspension of objective time and Levinas's reduction of the aforementioned. Doesn't Levinas point out that the reduction of what is said to a statement must be that which shows "the meaning proper to the statement, on the other side of the thematization of what is said?" Well, that's not really the case. Uniquely, it does not simply rule out the presence of an intentional object.
It is precisely because its purpose is to demonstrate the repetition of the subject in itself as diachrony that the ethical reduction requires the presence of said. Levinas's reduction is therefore not a reduction of the mentioned to the saying, but of the actual correlation between them or, of their simultaneity. It is not only possible, but also necessary for us to account for justice in the field of the social and this account must be based on its ethical necessity.
But it becomes clear in the light of ethical reduction that this transition cannot in any way consist of a simple deduction. To give such an account, we must first be able to "fix the meaning" of the "plot" of the utterance and reaffirm its irreducible difference from what was said. This work is performed between two main structural moments in the exposition of the book: "from-the-other" i.
