ABSTRACT
The chapter investigates classical as well as post-classical phenomenological approaches to the “phenomenon” of the other and otherness in order to highlight the ethical and political implications and consequences of these analyses. In the first section, we draw on Edmund Husserl’s conception of the ego’s experience of the other. Thereby, we focus on Husserl’s notion of empathy in order to evaluate its capacity to describe our ethical obligations and responsibilities that arise from the encounter with the alter ego. The question of whether Husserl’s account of empathy may satisfyingly describe the structure and scope of the Ethical as it occurs in intersubjective relations is examined in the second section. Turning to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, the concept of empathy is critically reconsidered and Levinas’s main arguments for repealing this classical phenomenological paradigm of thinking otherness are reconstructed. Along with this dissociation from the phenomenological tradition, Levinas’s late works can be read as an attempt of taking otherness as a starting point for reflections on subject constitution which are precisely situated in the realm of the Ethical and—as we show in the third section—the sphere of the Political. This also leads Levinas to conceiving of alterity as an intrinsically plural alterity—a plurality which is addressed, in Levinas, with the concept of the third party. Finally, we will outline the systematic consequences arising from such an ethico-political turn of phenomenology.
