Selfhood, personal identity and singularity are philosophical concepts which undergo a profound change in Levinas, who is led by three main propositions to transform them. The first of these propositions could hardly be simpler: I am myself and no other. The second proposition is more surprising, but it can lay just as well a claim to self-evidence: I remain myself without becoming another even if I do not remain the same as I were. Finally, the third proposition is not only baffling, but almost scandalous: The fact that I am myself and no other cannot be deduced from my identity with myself; it is rather the outcome of my relationshipwith the Other or, more precisely a consequence of what is described by Levinas as my substitution for the Other. These three propositions are inquired into and commented upon in the paper. It is shown, thereby, how a singularity without identity is conceived of by Levinas.

This paper aims to offer a new and alternative perspective on the basic idea of Levinas’s philosophy. My claim is that the latter can be more appropriately understood not as a contribution to a new way of thinking about ethics or the realm of the ethical as such, but rather toward the theory of normativity. The goal of Levinas’s reflections on alterity is to exhibit the normativity that is in play in all modes of understanding. Levinas tries to understand how intentional beings are normatively bound by one another. This paper tries to give answers to the questions of (1) why Levinas addresses questions of alterity, (2) what is distinctive about these questions according to his way of thinking, and (3) why one should consider Levinas’ thought from the perspective of the articulation of a theory of normativity.

According to Henry, in Husserl’s analysis of time the retentional intentionality of the “now” implies that you cannot have the sensation of its pure reality. This inner-phenomenological criticism can be generally transferred to the relationship between time and life, since temporality, as the most inner structure of the world of becoming-outsideitself, does not allow any affective self-appearance of life. Finally, this aspect has critical consequences for the existential structure of care, which must be suspended as “transcendental illusion” of the ego, in order to do justice to the immediacy of an immemorial birth in life.

Although Levinas’ “il y a” does not directly correspond to Heidegger’s conception of being, his criticism of Heidegger’s temporal ontology is nevertheless justified. With the reduction of every meaning (and being) to its temporal constitution, Heidegger excludes any possibility of transcendence beyond time. The problem of overcoming the radical finitude and historicity of meaning, which is ethically motivated, brings Levinas to the age-old question of metaphysics. However, taking Heidegger’s thought seriously, Levinas is forced to look for an entirely new understanding of the metaphysical quest.

This paper attempts a new interpretation of Heidegger’s existential analysis of the phenomena of fear and anxiety. Heidegger is shown to analyze both phenomena as basic states-of-mind (Grundbefindlichkeiten). Basic states-of-mind are taken to differ from other states-of mind in that they are formal phenomena, i.e. phenomena that are not apparent or experienced themselves, but only concretize in apparent and experienced phenomena. As an instance of phenomena, in which the formal phenomena of fear and anxiety concretize, the paper presents hüzün, a collective mood described by Orhan Pamuk in his latest novel.

Théophile Gautier, French romanticist writer, visits Russia twice in 1858/61. His Voyage en Russie (1866) is not just a travelogue, but rather an intrinsically philosophical text about travelling, about the perception of the own and the other, suggesting “(self)alienation”, “bracketing” of the world and one’s own experience as a means of aesthetic pleasure and intellectual penetration; a reflection on the “gift of the visible”; on the mutual in- and superscriptions of reality, imagination and art – in one word: a “phenomenological” experiment avant la lettre. This paper proposes a reading of Voyage en Russie through the prism of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, in particular of vision.

The phenomena of reading and hearing were among the fundamental themes of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics during the final decades of his life and scientific work. This assertion seems to be strange, especially if we pay attention to the fact that about the same time he worked on transforming his initial project of philosophical hermeneutics into the more ambi­tious hermeneutical philosophy. However, the universality of the phenomena of reading and hearing, which Gadamer defends in his last works, not only confirms but also concretizes the universality of the language dimension of all human experience. This concretization becomes apparent by explaining the structural correlation between hearing, understanding, and seeing. In view of these circumstances emerges the necessity of looking at the history of the “phenomenological movement” through the prism of the phenomenon of reading, which from the very outset was the implicit aim of phenomenological explanations.

The repetition of life is being examined on the basis of Henry’s analysis of life as a performance beyond habitualization as sedimentation in Husserl’s approach, as well as a difference in immanent conceptualization on the premise of the coveting organless body according to Deleuze. In contrast to this “nomadic thinking,” which always remains non-subjective, the emphasis in the original reciprocity of life and body is put on the basic transcendentality of the effective repetition of life in the bodily memorial of the radical phenomenological habitualization.

The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate Oskar Becker’s search for a complementarity between the paradigm of constitutional analysis put forward by Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology and constructivism as a meta-mathematical position suggesting criteria for existence of the mathematical objects. At stake is the issue of the possibility of an existential analytic of “the mathematical”. In this regard, a special attention is paid to the temporality of “mathematical existence”. Th e paper invites new forms of a dialogue between phenomenology and philosophy of mathematics.

This essay tries to show how Michel Henry’s Phenomenology of Life can be understood as a valuable criticism of hermeneutical philosophy and especially of hermeneutical phenomenology in the manner Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur had conceptualized it. Using Michel Henry’s concept of phenomenological distance, it will be shown here that on the basis of every hermeneutics there lies the classical topos of the auctorial intention that was once gained by the interpretation of texts and is simply ontologized by hermeneutical philosophers. What follows from such a perspective is that human life seems to be ontologically separated form itself, against which Michel Henry tries to show that each life can only be humane, both in relation to itself as well as to others, if it affects itself without any distance.

In this article I discuss Michel Henry’s concept of the political. I firstly show how it is derived within his radical phenomenology, secondly give an outline of his respective critique of totalitarianism, and finally question whether his approach is appropriate for adequately thinking the relationship between the social body and its symbolization, which is of paramount importance for any theoretical consideration of the political.

As any science presupposes a certain “something” for its constitution as a discipline, the same applies also for philosophy and theology as discourses of a specific intentionality. However, pure phenomenological life relies on an originary self-donation, which precedes any manifestation of language or scientific knowledge, and implies a practical “original intelligibility”, pertaining to any human being as his “transcendental birth”. Relating to Michel Henry, this circumstance will be confronted with the self-revelation in Christianity, involving a discussion of the phenomenological status of the Scripture, as well as a delimitation from any Gnosis. Hence, the “word of life” (of God), preceding any manifestation of language, coincides with an immediate ethos, that can be illustrated by the “acts of compassion”. The text conceives itself as a preliminary work for a religious philosophy founded in the phenomenology of life.