SELBST UND LEIB. AUSEINANDERSETZUNGEN MIT DEM DEUTSCHEN IDEALISMUS BEI HUSSERL UND LEVINAS
SELF AND BODY. HUSSERL’S AND LEVINAS’ DEBATES WITH THE GERMAN IDEALISM

Summary/Abstract: The article follows some lines of thought in Husserl and Levinas, their texts namely in which theclose relation between the self and body should be grasped as one of the topics where the idealisticapproach to subjectivity is abandoned. Already in Husserl one can find reflections on the significantaffective-bodily dimension of the transcendental subjectivity itself which is one of the ways he overcomesthe classical dualistic modern philosophical tradition. Levinas went even further in his criticaldebate with this classical thinking and — in certain continuity with Husserl — gave a new account ofthe affective-bodily constitution of the singularity of human subjectivity. In both cases thesingularisa-tion of the self pass through an intersubjective constitution of the own body that is anevent for Levinas that precedes an egoic consciousness. But in both cases there is a problem that thetheories cannot solve: the body as mine has to be presupposed. There is a certain self-preceding of thelived body that seems to function as a basis for the self-awareness in the lived experiences, a facticalbasis that not only relativizes an idealistic point of departure in a pure I but also destabilize anyattempt to build a system upon the phenomenological accounts of the relation between the body andthe self. The transcenden-tal-phenomenological reductions, the genetic ones in Husserl, and theethical ones in Levinas, lead to more (Levinas) or less (Husserl) radical divergences with the projectsof totalizing systems in the style of the German idealism.

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