ABSTRACT
Levinas, like Derrida, had begun his thinking with the most intimate and probing reading of Husserl, and had marked out his own position on the margins of the phenomenological map, neither quite within it nor completely apart. Levinas, like Derrida, had come to find in the ‘principle of principles’—intentionality-an undiminished commitment to the founding privilege of the individual subject. Each moved to explode that sacred interiority. But while for Derrida that rupture was achieved by the development and deployment of strategies of deformative reading (in which all forms of semantic, epistemological and ontological closure were undermined, ‘deconstructed’), Levinas chose a different point d’appui: the relation to the Other, the face-to-face relation.
