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SELF AND BODY. HUSSERL'S AND LEVINAS' DEBATES WITH THE GERMAN IDEALISM

Abstract
The article follows some lines of thought in Husserl and Levinas, their texts namely in which the close relation between the self and body should be grasped as one of the topics where the idealistic approach to subjectivity is abandoned. Already in Husserl one can find reflections on the significant affective-bodily dimension of the transcendental subjectivity itself which is one of the ways he overcomes the classical dualistic modern philosophical tradition. Levinas went even further in his critical debate with this classical thinking and — in certain continuity with Husserl — gave a new account of the affective-bodily constitution of the singularity of human subjectivity. In both cases the singularisation of the self pass through an intersubjective constitution of the own body that is an event for Levinas that precedes an egoic consciousness. But in both cases there is a problem that the theories cannot solve: the body as mine has to be presupposed. There is a certain self-preceding of the lived body that seems to function as a basis for the self-awareness in the lived experiences, a factical basis that not only relativizes an idealistic point of departure in a pure I but also destabilize any attempt to build a system upon the phenomenological accounts of the relation between the body and the self. The transcendental-phenomenological reductions, the genetic ones in Husserl, and the ethical ones in Levinas, lead to more (Levinas) or less (Husserl) radical divergences with the projects of totalizing systems in the style of the German idealism.

Key words
Subjectivity, self, corporeal / Leib, body / Körper, affectivity, sensuousness, singularity.

References

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