Abstract

The paper is devoted to the development of Emmanuel Lévinas’ philosophy of the subject as expounded in his Autrement qu’être ou au-délà de l’essence. Levinas claims that the subject is good but emerges from a formless substrate; for this reason it belongs to something which can described as anonymous, dark, ignorant, sensual — the otherness. An attempt to define the structure of the subject as an abstract entity is only possible in virtue of the fact that its form has been separated from something that is difficult not only to describe but also to understand, even by intuition. In this sense one may say that the subject discovers itself as the Other. The subject discovers its own belonging to the Otherness which precedes the process of becoming its own. Finally, the subject knows that the only way to be Itself is to take responsibility for the otherness through which it establishes its subjectivity as such