ABSTRACT
Totality and Infinity began its approach to sensibility by contrasting enjoyment with intentionality. It then revealed how this subject comes into question in an encounter with the Other. In this encounter the subject discovers an ethical sense which contradicts the movement of affective self-positing in enjoyment. The sensibility of enjoyment and ethical signification stand in a contradictory, yet non-dialectical relation to one another. In Otherwise than Being, by contrast, subjectivity is described in terms of an ethical sensibility. The question of affectivity is introduced into Levinas’ critique of Heidegger by linking the essencing of being to an affectivity, or lived sensibility (which Husserl had explored as the fundamental, pre-predicative level of judgement). Although Levinas might have originally relied on Heidegger’s existential analysis of affective life to question the limits of the Husserlian lived body, he now questions the “formalism” of Heidegger’s conceptualisation of the human [der Mensch] in terms of an exposedness to the essencing of being. Levinas suggests that Heidegger reduces the sensible to a correlate of the said. The exposedness to being admits no sense of the material vulnerability of embodied subjectivity. For Levinas, only an ethical saying can be the source of
right, without which being’s justice reverts to a law that cannot recognise the human.
