The Singularity of the Self : The principles of personal identity in Levinas' descriptions of the pre-ethical level of subjectivity

Emmanuel Levinas is commonly treated as a first and foremost ethical thinker. In this essay I want to offer an alternative reading of Levinas’ first main work, Totality and Infinity, by shifting the attention from the singularity of the Other, to the singularity of the self. I will do this by presenting a reconstruction and analysis of the two main principles of personal identity that are to be found in the book. On the ground achieved by these analyses, I claim that Levinas is defending a “minimally existentialistic” self, an understanding of subjectivity that shares crucial premises with the existentialist tradition, even while criticising it. Finally I claim that the great importance attributed to the subject in Levinas’ philosophy, along with his understanding of the synthesis of the active and the passive characteristics of the subject, leads Levinas into an ambiguous understanding of the status of the singularity of the Other