Vor dem anderen denken: Emmanuel Levinas

After some short remarks on the philosophical and bibliographical context of Levinas’ work follows the presentation of his so called »Humanism of the Other«, founded on his critique of the tradition of ontology and modern transcendental philosophy and on his plea for »ethics as prima philosophia«. The article focusses on Levinas’ new perspective on subjectivity, which implicates in principle the relation to alterity and is hereby breaking with the traditional understanding of self-identical, self-conscious and »closed« subjectivity. In the perspective of Levinas’ »linguistic revision« of this phenomenological approach, based on the notion of the »saying« (as primary and preontological exposition in the face of the Other), the aim is to show in general, how every discourse (philosophy, theory of self, humanities etc.) has to be thought as alienated from itself by a finally undefined and unreductible »something« — his other —, which crept into it and has undermined it the more it tries to exclude it. For this unreductible alienation makes any philosophical trial of ultimate foundation per se impossible, Levinas’ philosophy calls for a new thinking, which takes seriously his essential openness for, his obsession by and his »responsability« toward the other.