Levinasís philosophy represents a critique of the self presentation,
autonomy and knowledge that constitutes the Cartesian cogito.^20
In place of an ëintentional consciousnessí that limits the world by
thinking in relation to itself, Levinas posits the ënon-intentional
consciousnessí or ënon-reflective consciousnessí that does not know
itself; it is ëpre-reflectiveí and ëeffaces presenceí.^21 Levinasís phil-
osophy has large implications for the theorization of identity politics
since he suggests that the subject is infiltrated by alterity and that
essentialist versions of identity do not hold. For Levinas, com-
munication brings about such a situation as ëspeech situates the self in
relation to the other in a way that shows us how being for the other is
the first fact of existenceí:^22 ëWhereas ontology ultimately must
reduce saying to the totalizing enclosure of the said, saying is a state
of openness to the other [Ö] Subjectivity is the dis-interested
vulnerability of saying.í^23 Levinas argues against the ontology and
phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, to suggest
that language or ësayingí is a process whereby subjectivity is con-
stituted by alterity.^24 The ontology of the subject and her/his
epistemological autonomy are shown to be suspect, and for Levinas,
the subject is a being-for-the ëotherí rather than being-in or for-itself.
Rather than the subject mastering alterity, s/he is engaged in com-
munication or communion with the ëother.í
20 Hand, ed., ‘Introduction’, Levinas Reader, p.6.
21 Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, p.128.
22 Hand, ed., Levinas Reader, p.144.
23 Ibid., p.6.
24 Cf. Edmund Husserl’s Vienna Lecture, ‘Philosophy in the Crisis of European
Mankind’, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy:
An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1970); Martin Heidegger, ‘The Formal Structure of the
Question of Being’, ‘Introduction’ to Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and
E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). ‘Phenomenology’ can be defined as
‘the science of phenomena distinct from being’ (The Concise Oxford English
Dictionary, ed., Della Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon, 9th edn., 1995), p.1025)
that ‘inspects one’s own conscious, and particularly intellectual processes. In
the inspection all assumptions about the wider and external causes and
consequences of these internal processes have to be excluded (“ bracketed” ).
“ Ontology” can be described as a branch of metaphysical inquiry concerned
with the study of existence itself (considered apart from the nature of any
existent object).’ A Dictionary of Philosophy, ed., Anthony Flew (London:
Pan/Macmillan, 1979), pp.255–6, p.266.