Abstract

In Otherwise than Being, Emmanuel Levinas develops an ethical thought by defining the conditions of possibility of a language able to signify being starting from other than being. The vocabulary of Otherwise than Being leaves no doubt as to how Levinas overdetermines ontological categories to achieve a kind of transmutation of subjectivity – subjectivity as hostage, passivity, assigned to an anteriority of responsibility and command. In our study we question the different modalities of this new grammar of the subjectivity of the subject, which is characterized by a pure passivity and an affect that is irrecuperable on the phenomenological level, as always already past. It is from this horizon that Levinas discusses the question of the third and justice.