Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence

Rating:
Summary: otherwise than self
Review: "Otherwise Than Being" is one of the only metaphysical text that seriously revise and rehabilitate the notion of the subject after Heidegger's deconstruction and critique of it. Proposing a "de-nucleated" subject, a subject that is non-indifferent to the other, Emmanuel Levinas continues the intuitions he first draw in "Totality and Infinity". But rather than simply continue directly and without revision the acquisitions of "Totality and Infinity", Levinas integrates Derrida's critique (drawn in his important article on Levinas,"Violence and Metaphysics") of the still to ontological/phenomenological discourse of "Totality and Infinity". Therefore, in "Otherwise than Being", his second Masterpiece, Levinas is developing a completely new style, a radically new way-of-thinking. Being not committed anymore neither to phenomenology nor to ontology, Levinas offers us an exercise of post-heidegerrian metaphysics that doesn't fall under the critique of philosophy as onto-theo-logy. The pre-original dimension of psychism, the an-archic dimension of the Self, or subjectivity as "other-in-the-Self" are themes breaking the classical metaphysical discourse without abandoning the primacy of the subject, or of ethics. Finally, "Otherwise than Being" is the first important challenge to Nietzsche's parricide, the first (and maybe only) text that tries to re-hear the authentic signification of the word (or name?): God.

Rating:
Summary: otherwise than self
Review: "Otherwise Than Being" is one of the only metaphysical text that seriously revise and rehabilitate the notion of the subject after Heidegger's deconstruction and critique of it. Proposing a "de-nucleated" subject, a subject that is non-indifferent to the other, Emmanuel Levinas continues the intuitions he first draw in "Totality and Infinity". But rather than simply continue directly and without revision the acquisitions of "Totality and Infinity", Levinas integrates Derrida's critique (drawn in his important article on Levinas,"Violence and Metaphysics") of the still to ontological/phenomenological discourse of "Totality and Infinity". Therefore, in "Otherwise than Being", his second Masterpiece, Levinas is developing a completely new style, a radically new way-of-thinking. Being not committed anymore neither to phenomenology nor to ontology, Levinas offers us an exercise of post-heidegerrian metaphysics that doesn't fall under the critique of philosophy as onto-theo-logy. The pre-original dimension of psychism, the an-archic dimension of the Self, or subjectivity as "other-in-the-Self" are themes breaking the classical metaphysical discourse without abandoning the primacy of the subject, or of ethics. Finally, "Otherwise than Being" is the first important challenge to Nietzsche's parricide, the first (and maybe only) text that tries to re-hear the authentic signification of the word (or name?): God.

Rating:
Summary: The Otherwise than Being
Review: This title deals with the otherwise than. A true masterpiece of the pre-ontological and ontological discouse which not only binds self to Other (through an asymetric responsibility--see substition) but also uncovers and builds off the earlier work of Heidegaar.