Abstract

I propose to look at Levinas’ constellation of figures: recurrence, obsession, persecution, substitution and saying, in chapter IV of Otherwise than Being. This is the core of his 1974 work. I tarry with a remark that Levinas makes there, “Our analyses lay claim to the spirit of Husserlian philosophy […] But […] the present work ventures beyond phenomenology”. Substitution thus returns to Husserl’s passive syntheses, arguing that not everything about sensibility and affect is meaningful or enters into associations of intentions. To dig beneath thematizing consciousness required that Levinas adapt Heidegger’s hermeneutic extension of phenomenology, with its pre-structures, to open phenomenology to interpretive dimensions of lived immediacy. The question of passivity would requires reading Husserl through Heidegger. The task of opposing responsibility to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology necessitates a return to Husserl’s phenomenology of passivity.