Sense and Transcendence: the problem of alterity in Emmanuel Lévinas

Abstract

The present article aims to describe, based on Emmanuel Lévinas’ ethics, the relationship between the self and the other. Although such relation has not been considered new in the philosophical horizon, the thinker intended to break through the readings that had proposed a sameness principle, which had remarked that the other may be revealed through a projection of the self. Thus, in order to break this interpretive framework, Lévinas proposed to consider the distance between the self and the other in which subjectivity is interpreted as based in the idea of infinity, such as the one that has regarded the other as absolutely transcendent.