Abstract

In this dissertation I examine the self-other relation in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, as it is presented in his two major works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence. In Part One I set up the problem through a reading of Sections II and III of Totality and Infinity on the self and the other, respectively. First the self establishes its identity by itself through a series of moments in which it reduces all otherness to the same. Then the absolute other arrives on the scene, challenging the self from an ethical height, teaching it. But in the discussion of the other in terms of the "face," it becomes clear that the other comes first. The other has always already entered into the world of the self and is even essential to the very constitution of the self. At the end of Part One I raise difficulties with Levinas' presentation. If, as it turns out, the other is significant in determining the very identity of the self, then what is to be made of the descriptions of the self, what significance can the self have, prior to the relation to the other? How are we to understand this absolute relation? ;In Part Two of the dissertation I develop the topic through an interpretation of Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence. In my reading I emphasize the diachronicity of time, the countercurrent temporality at play in the relation between the self and the other. It is my thesis that it is diachronic temporality that provides the key to resolving the difficulties raised at the end of Part One. ;Part Three ties together the analyses given in Parts One and Two to respond to the issues raised at the end of Part One. In connection with diachronic temporality, I discuss the idea of the infinite, the cogito, and the self of interiority and economy, as commencements which lead beyond themselves, to a point prior to their upsurge as origins, where their very conception is exceeded and inverted, in the anarchy of the infinite. I conclude that the self of interiority and economy never was, and yet, against all logic, in diachronic temporality, which runs against the flow of being, it was. ;Thus I provide an interpretation which affirms the priority of the other, but which maintains the significance of the self in the diachrony