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In chapter 1, I already discussed the difficulties inherent in the traditional phenomenological approach as practiced by Husserl, and, to some degree, by Heidegger. Despite their initial commitment to a philosophy that goes back to the things themselves, a philosophy that concerns itself with the world as it shows itself, all phenomenologists finally retreated to a phenomenology of the structures of consciousness. Levinas believes that ethics can only succeed if it is able to account for the other in her radical difference from the self; for him, the problematic of traditional phenomenology lies in its failure to ground alterity epistemologically. However, the term "epistemological" has to be applied with care, since it already invokes the problem of knowledge and hence the problem of the subject. Levinas attempts to construct an epistemology in such a way that knowledge neither thematizes,¹ nor gathers nor assembles the aspects of alterity into the sphere of the self-same. The result is that alterity cannot be treated as a fact anymore, since facts are pieces of information that come to be known by the subject. It is instead an epistemology that radically displaces the subject and prioritizes the other. ²

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-5198-6_5

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