ABSTRACT
Let me begin with a first working hypothesis: the condition of possibility for the ethical relation to the other, that is, the condition of possibility for ethical transcendence, communication and beyond that justice, politics and the whole field of the third party with the specific meanings that Levinas gives to these terms, is a conception of the subject.1 Thus, it is only because there is a certain disposition towards alterity within the subject, as the structure or pattern of subjectivity, that there can be an ethical relation. Levinas writes in the 1968 version of ‘Substitution’ (to which we will have more than one occasion to return):
It is from subjectivity understood as a self, from the excidence and dispossession of contraction, whereby the Ego does not appear but immolates itself, that the relationship with the other is possible as communication and transcendence.2
