Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1996) are separated in time by two centuries, but by their origin in geographical space they are nearly neighbours. The distance from Keningsberg where Kant lived and Kovno where Levinas was born is not very great. One belongs to the tradition of German philosophy, the other – to the French, but they both can be considered as "the most Lithuanian" of all famous philosophers. J. Stradinis in his article "Did Kantian ancestors descend from the Kurshes?" writes, that together with German blood Kant has a bit not Scottish, as it was suggested earlier, but Kurshian and, it seems Lithuanian. He suggests deriving the origin of Kant’s name from the place Kantwain – nowadays the village Kantvonai in the Silutes district, five kilometers East of Priekule. Stradinis explains that Kant’s great-grandfather was a tavern-keeper in Rusne, and his father and grandfather were saddle-makers1. Maybe for this kinship, or maybe for some strictness of thinking and for this reason – proximity to some "archetypal forms" of Lithuanian mentality, Kant never lacked attention from Lithuanian philosophy critics. Romanas Pleckaitis translated his works Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Prolegomena, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Kristina Rickeviciute – Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. His political treatises are translated and published as well.

Levinas’ grandparents lived in Kovno near the big synagogue. Levinas spent his childhood near the river at Kalejimo Street (recently – Spaustuvininku). When he left for Strasbourg as an exchange student from Lithuania and stayed in France for the rest time of his life, his parents moved to contemporary Mickeviciaus street No.192. Levinas family used Russian in family communication, but Levinas’ father made their family name Levyne as Lithuanian, adding the ending – as. The author of Levinas biography Marie-Anne Lescourret states, that Levinas, as well as his wife Raisa were never homesick for Lithuania, because at the beginning of the war their families were killed here3. Levinas’ parents and brothers, Aminadab and Boris, were killed just near their home. On the other hand, she interprets Levinas as Litvak, who grew up under the influence of Gaon from Vilnius and even in this origin of Levinas she discerns the main differences between his and Martin’ Buber’s versions of dialogical philosophy. Maybe there is some sense in the phrase of Levinas in Jerusalem: "Je pensais que Kovno était morte, je sais que Kovno est éternelle"4.

Kant and Levinas answer this question differently. Kant did not deny happiness as the landmark for human inclinations. "But here also do men of themselves already have, irrespective of duty, the strongest and deepest inclination toward happiness, because just in this idea are all inclinations combined into a total sum", wrote Kant in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals5. Even more. Kant considered, that to secure ones own happiness is a duty, for discontent with one’s condition under many pressing cares and amid unsatisfied wants might easily become a great temptation to transgress one’s duties. "Discontent with one’s own condition" recalls Nietzsche’s discerned ressentiment. Those who are discontent revolt against those who are able to be content and restrict their power of life. Kant reasons differently: "Discontent with one’s own condition" could violate the fundamental source of human dignity – one’s ability to constrain inclinations with the endowment of reason. The Kantian argument conceals an immanent paradox: needs should be satisfied for the sake of reason’s ability more easily to dominate over them. In the Kantian ethics not happiness, but duty is the condition of the autonomy of moral subject.

Levinas, on the contrary, postulated as the primary presupposition for the autonomy of the subject his ability to experience happiness as existential enjoyment, (jouissance). By this presupposition he challenges Plato’s psychology in which the need is postulated as a simple lack or, as in Kantian ethics, pure passivity6.

Kant did not state, that a subject is incapable of experiencing happiness. He stated only that he is incapable of reasoning to it as a principle. There is no possibility to express this in a formula or as a law, because whatever it is possible to say about it, happiness as an idea would always transcend the limits of this saying. One can conclude that here Kant quite critically evaluates the power of principles. The principles have great power for the source from which they stemmed, that is for reason. But the emotional life of a subject is more complicated and irreducible to one formula. The constantly changing circumstances of life permanently adjust the imaginable ideal of happiness for the subject. Kant is not very fond of this instability of the human situation. He only stated it, even expressing regret by adding the word "unfortunately". Kant wrote: "But, unfortunately, the concept of happiness is such an indeterminate one that even though everyone wishes to attain happiness, yet he can never say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills"7. For to determine the idea of happiness there would need to be an absolute whole, a maximum of well being in the present and in every future condition. The inner contradiction of the emotional life of the subject is not however the greatest unfortunate; that is the instability of the future. It is unfortunate because even in the case in which the subject is able to attain what he longed for, the results would never bring him what he really wanted. Does he want riches? How much anxiety, envy, and intrigue might he not thereby bring down upon his head? If one wants knowledge and insight, one never knows perhaps if these might give him only an eye that much sharper for revealing much more dreadful evils. If one wants long life, which guarantees that it would not be a long misery? Yet very often infirmity of the body kept one from excesses into which perfect health would have allowed him to fall.

Levinas, contrary to Kant, considers happiness as the fundamental mode of this life. Yet he indicated much broader possibilities of experiencing this feeling than the modest good self-feeling indicated by Kant. The possibility of enjoyment, as happiness in the phenomenology of Levinas takes its sources from various possible experiences of things. We live from "good soup’, air, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep, etc, wrote Levinas8. Happiness is even the joy of breathing, looking, eating, working, handling a hammer and the machine, etc. Levinas considers things as being more than answers to strict needs; they make up the grace of life. Happiness is made up not of an absence of needs whose tyranny and imposed character one denounces, but of a satisfaction of all needs. Happiness is accomplishment: it exists in a soul that is satisfied, not in a soul that has extirpated its needs, a castrated soul. Life is affectivity and sentiment; to live is to enjoy life. "Life is love of life"9.

Does this mean that Levinas did not notice suffering which according to Buda or Arthur Schopenhauer’s teaching penetrates all human existence? Levinas just changes the point of departure. To despair of life makes sense only because originally life is happiness. Suffering is a failing of happiness; it is not correct to say that happiness is an absence of suffering10.

"How could the Kantian kingdom of ends be possible, had not the rational beings that compose it retained, as the principle of individuation, their exigency for happiness, miraculously saved from the shipwreck of sensible nature?" concluded Levinas. " In Kant the I is met with again in this need for happiness"11. It is obvious that Levinas is inclined to emphasize his affinities with Kantian ethics, not his differences. Why?

Kant critically revaluated all the attempts of previous ethics to ground morality on eudemonism and the heterogeneous empirical consequences. He was a creator of autonomous deontological ethics. Kant starts from a critique of theoretical reason and only afterwards moves to the critique of practical reason. Not having found the possibility of solving the aporia between freedom and determinism on the level of theoretical reason, Kant solved it by the means of practical reason. Levinas starts from theoretical philosophy as well. He studied Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s ontology. As a result of these studies he announced ethics as the first philosophy – philosophy before ontology, naming ethics as metaphysics. Trying to provide background for this insight, he begins his critical discussion not only with the tradition of classical ethics stemming from Aristotle, but also from phenomenology, Hegelian dialectics of "master and slave", Heidegger’s ontology, Sartrean existentialism and even the philosophy of dialogue of Martin Buber. Much less did he oppose Kantian ethics. Levinas’s philosophy consists in a critique of knowledge, as does Kantian philosophy too. One can notice several important ways in which his critique differs from the Kantian one: knowledge in Levinas’ philosophy does emerge not more modest, but more realistic in its pretensions. Knowledge is denied and something (better) proposed in its place. Besides, in Levinas philosophy it is not all of knowledge that is criticized, but only knowledge of persons. Knowledge is held by Levinas to be a kind of violence, when deployed against human beings13. However in opposing the violence of such knowledge Levinas interacted more with Husserl and Heidegger than with Kant.

Levinas’s dialogue with his teachers – Husserl and Heidegger is intensive and permanent. He constantly referred to them and polemicized with them both. As concluded Jacques Derrida, "Levinas, uncomfortably situated in the difference between Husserl and Heidegger, – and, indeed, by virtue of the history of his thought – always criticizes the one in a style and according to a scheme borrowed from the other, and finished by sending them off into the wings together as partners in the "play of the same" and as accomplices in the same historico-philosophical coup"14. The result of this coup from the point of view of Levinas: an impossibility of meeting the Other as a Revelation and epiphany. The Other from the perspective of Husserl and Heidegger remains only phenomenon surrounded by other phenomena, or lost in the totality of Being.

Levinas criticized also Martin’ Buber’s philosophy of dialogue regardless of the fact that Buber, as well as Franz Rosenzweig, showed Levinas the path from the absolutism of Hegelian monism and opened the perspective of dialogical thinking. In his text, Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy, Levinas emphasized that namely Buber sees the response as a condition of responsibility. Trans-subjectivity thus appears in Buber’s work as a reciprocal responsibility, in keeping with the ancient Talmudic expression: "all in Israel are responsible for one another". So Buber, together with Marcel suggested a new ethics. This ethics begins neither in a mystical valuation of a few values having the status of Platonic ideas, nor on a basis of a prior thematization, knowledge and theory of being, culminating in a self-knowledge, of which ethics would constitute a consequence or appendix, nor in the universal law of Reason. Ethics begins before the exteriority of the other, before other people. Levinas prolonged this path of Buber’s new ethics saying that ethics begins before the face of the other. This engages my responsibility by its human expression, which cannot – without being changed or immobilized – be held objectively at a distance15.

But, on the other hand, in this text, as well as in Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism16, Levinas interprets Buber’s invented I-Thou meeting as a "purely formal meeting". According to Levinas’ view, Buber cannot avoid formality by continuous repetitions of the word ‘responsibility’. Meetings are, for Buber, dazzling instants without continuity and content: pure act of transcendence, pure spark like the instant of Bergsonian intuition, like the "almost-nothing" of the Bergsonian thinker Jankelevitch17. Buber was not an admirer of Heidegger. He raised violent opposition to the Heideggerian notion of Fürsorge which, to the German philosopher, would be access to the Other. Levinas used to oppose Heidegger on his own grounds, but in this place Levinas did not share Buber’s critique of Heidegger and supported Heidegger over Buber. Acknowledging that "it is certainly not from Heidegger that one should take lessons on the love of man or social justice", on the other had, Levinas notices that from Heideggerian Fürsorge one can go further to the alterity of the other. He takes into account that dimension of height and misery through which the epiphany of the Other takes place. Clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, according to Levinas, brings us closer to the neighbour than the rarefied atmosphere in which Buber’s meeting sometime takes place18.

The interesting thing to notice is that Levinas in his polemic with Buber referred to Kant, as well as to Dostoyevsky. Even thought he did not analyse their views so eagerly as those of Husserl, Heidegger or Buber. Levinas mentioned them more rarely than the precursors he criticized, but leaned on them when seeking a broader context to express his own value orientation. In 1967 after the appearance of his main treatise, Totality and Infinity (Totalite et infini, 1961), when delivering the lectures in Brussels, Substitution, Levinas, first provided a critical analyses of the concept of personal identity as coinciding with oneself, self-possession, or sovereignty so popular in the philosophical tradition of the West. He then turns towards the Copernican revolution of Kant. Levinas wants to neglect all the details of philosophical architecture of Kantianism and to take one trait from Kants’ system – he would like to think of that Kantianism, which finds meaning in the human without measuring it by ontology and outside of the question "What is there here...?". "The fact that immortality and theology could not determine the categorical imperative signifies the novelty of the Copernican revolution: a sense that is not measured by being and not being itself; but being on the contrary is determined on the basis of sense"1 9. Levinas agreed with the Kantian notion of the categorical imperative while attempting to avoid the architectonics of his system.

Levinas in establishing a place for ethics as the first philosophy leaned on not only the Kantian critique of practical reason, but on the critique of theoretical reason as well. In Totality and Infinity Levinas considers ethics as metaphysics, which, according to Levinas, is enacted in inter-human relations. Theological concepts without ethics remain empty and formal frameworks. Inter-human relations in metaphysics Levinas compares with the role Kant attributed to sensible experience in the domain of understanding. It is from moral relationships that every metaphysical affirmation takes on a "spiritual" meaning, states Levinas. "When I maintain an ethical relation I refuse to recognize the role I would play in a drama of which I would not be the author or whose outcome another would know before me; I refuse to figure in a drama of salvation or of damnation that would be enacted in spite of me and that would make game of me"20.

Levinas is really very close to Kant recognizing the priority and autonomy of moral subject as compared to all the other factors in the world. This respect of the person as a first postulate of practical reason draws closer both philosophers regardless of the fact that the presuppositions of their ethics are quite different: Kant started from the universality of common reason, Levinas from meeting the Other: the face of the Other as a revelation of Infinity, which shakes the ego logy of my existence. Levinas, as notices Derrida, is inspired by a messianic eschatology. This messianic eschatology is never mentioned literally, "it is but a question of designating a space or a hollow within naked experience where this eschatology can be understood and where it must resonate"21.

Charles Taylor in his book, Sources of Self, interpreted Kantian ethics as a continuation of the Christian Augustinian line. He noticed that, like Augustine, Kant based his ethics on a presupposition that everything depends on a transformation of the will. The moral person may lead the same external life as the non-moral one, but is inwardly transformed by a different spirit, he is animated by a different end. Kant thus draws heavily on Augustine’s model of the two loves, the two directions of human motivation. Notwithstanding that Kant’s conception is radically anthropocentric, his theory, concluded Taylor, has deep roots in Christian theology, and Kant remained a believing Christian"22. In my opinion, the presuppositions of Levinas’ ethics could be derived from Dostoyevsky’s phrase: "we all are guilty for everything, for everybody and before everybody, and me – more than everyone else". Levinas considers this responsibility as the main source of identity of the subject: "Je puis me substituer à tous, mai nul ne peut se substituer à moi. Telle est mon identité inaliénable de sujet. C’est dans ce sens précis que Dostoievski dit: "Nous sommes tous responsables de tout et de tous et devant tous, et moi plus que tous les autres"23. By this phrase Dostoyevsky interpreted the main requirement of the disinterested love for the neighbour imposed by Christian Bible. Integrating Dostoyevsky’ approach as the main value approach Levinas accepted at the same time presuppositions of Christianity. His ethics at its roots becomes more close to the Christian line, interpreted by Dostoyevsky than to the Jewish tradition interpreted as symmetrical dialogue in Buber’s version. One can see that Christian ethics brings Kant much closer to Levinas than all the other philosophers Levinas discussed.

Kant’s statement, that inner feeling gives us a subject, allows, according to Levinas, to perceive the essence of subject as never coinciding with one’s image of oneself. The subject is a freedom in respect to any object, it is a subject for him. Such subject is in the light; he is the ability of infinite retreat, able to be always beyond everything what happens to us. The metaphor of light always was connected with power. Derrida, interpreting Levinas, recalled the phrase of Borges, who said: "perhaps universal history is but the history of several metaphors." Derrida ads, that "Light is only one example of these "several’ fundamental ‘metaphors"24.

Levinas here turns to Kant because his notion of the transcendental subject is close to Husserl’s subject. In his text, Outside the Subject, Levinas wrote, that phenomenology heralded a new atmosphere in European philosophy and that for a whole generation of students and readers of Logical Investigations this atmosphere meant an access of thought to being, thought stripped of subjectivist encumbrances, and hence a return to ontology without criticism problems, "the return to the things themselves"25. Levinas himself was influenced by this atmosphere. He began to study philosophy from the viewpoint of Husserl’s phenomenology. At this time Husserl was not broadly known in France. In 1929 Levinas published the survey of Husserl’ philosophy About the Ideas of Husserl (Sur les "Ideen" de m.E.Husserl), and in 1930 The Theory of Intuition in the phenomenology of Husserl (La theorie de l’intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl), for which he received the prize of the French Academy.

Levinas traces the origination of this pure ego, the pure I outside the subject in the Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Namely Kant distinguished it from datum presented to knowledge in the a priori forms of experience. The purity of this transcendental ego "and nothing more" is a challenge to the messianic intentions of Levinas. Is the light of thought destined only to help us see the synthetic forms that through already constituted through jumbled, structureless elements of the sensible, –asked Levinas rhetorically. He asked this in order to prepare a path to further questions, leading him aside from the transcendental ego. "But the positing of the transcendental I in its uniqueness, ensuring the truth of being in the realm of appearance – is it not ordered, in its uniqueness, in a different light than the one illuminating the structures of the phenomenon? Does it not hark back to the ethical intrigue prior to all knowledge? Face to face with the other man that a man indeed approaches as presence? <...>Had he not already been exposed to the misery of nakedness, but also to the loneliness of the face and hence to the categorical imperative of assuming responsibility for that misery?", step by step Levinas distance himself from the pure ego discerned by Husserl and Kant2 6.

Levinas differs from Kant in one important aspect: he reasoned from the perspective of phenomenological ethics and for this reason he introduced new factors into the ethical discourse, which are not able to be drawn from the presuppositions of Kantian ethics: the Other, as the second person (autrui), the Gaze of the Other, the face of the other. Clear vision in Levinas’ phenomenology of gaze does not open, it wants to see, but hides. Levinas wrote about the history as about the process of blinding to the Other. Jean-Paul Sartre discovered the aggression of gaze27, Michel Foucault – the un-proportionality of observation of Other (the mentally sick in an asylum or prisoners) as an asymmetry in the distribution of power28. Levinas in his ethics as a spiritual optics would question the power of the gaze. The gaze is aggressive; sight investigates; vision does not respect the otherness of the Other. But the face of the Other I meet is not visible. The respect to the face arises beyond grasping, contact, smelling or taste. It can arise as desire. But in contrast to Hegelian desire, Levinas’ desire does not seek to dominate and to use. If the Other could be possessed, seized and known, it would not be the Other. To possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power. For this reason, noted Derrida, Levinas valued sound higher than light29. To meet the face of the Other means to hear things that are not visible. The face of the Other opens itself beyond any sign, it could not be thematized. I cannot speak about the Other as about an object. I must speak always to the Other, addressing him. "Speaking, rather than ‘letting be’, solicits the Other. Speech cuts across vision", concludes Levinas30.

One must seek the face of the Other only as unreachable, invisible, untouchable. When one addresses the Other without the aggression of his glance, the word of the Other reaches him as a prayer of request, the face of the Other is calling for help. But does clear vision reveal what it exposes or does it hide? Levinas will describe history as the blinding to the Other31. Is not light becoming the source of the violence?

As noted Derrida, for Levinas the sun will always illumine the pure awakening as inexhaustible source of thought. It became also an instrument of destruction for the phenomenology and ontology subjected to the neutral totality of the Same as Being or as Ego32. However, the consequences of this "destruction" remained in the intentionality of Levinas’ research. In the process of this immanent critique – opposing Heidegger against Husserl, and again Husserl against Heidegger – Levinas is forming his own style of phenomenology.

Levinas stepped back from Husserl’s understanding of intentionality, which was based on a symmetric correlation between noesis and noema. He leaned on the third Cartesian metaphysical meditation, in which the French philosopher wrote that human consciousness includes in itself not only the idea of itself, but the primary and irreducible idea of Infinity as well. The subject is able neither to create Infinity, nor to understand it. Infinity differs from the noemos or cogitatum because it fundamentally transcends our ability to grasp and to understand. From the Cartesian point of view this Infinity is God. But the formal structure of the argument also could be applied to the Other human being. Levinas did this. The Other is the one who remains invisible, who comes from above, who excels me. The Face is the faceless God, says Levinas. He is faceless for the reason that I do not see him, I do not investigate him by my vision. I hear him. He appeals to me, he commands me. "Speaking rather than "letting be", solicits the Other. Speech cuts across vision"33. So the Face has the modus of God – Infinity. Levinas gives the ability to the subject of his ethics not only to reason about Infinity, but to experience Infinity as well. God is here – before me – I meet him in the Face of the Other.

By modes of finitude and infinity Paul Ricoeur would construct his ethics of the will. He would use them to reveal the vulnerability and fragility of a man. Ricoeur, the same as Levinas, would turn to the fourth Meditation of Descartes in which the subject states that he cannot be surprised that he errs, because when comparing himself to Infinity he finds his own imperfectness. Kantian transcendental apperception as a synthesis of finite as sensible and infinite is the point of departure for the structuring of ethics in the early writings of Ricoeur. On the other hand, Ricoeur indicates the differences between him and Kant, because he prefers to say that the synthesis is the primary one of meaning and appearance, rather than a synthesis of the intelligible and the sensible34. Contrary to Ricoeur, Levinas intends to return to "pure" Descartes, considering Kantian (the same as Heideggerian) salvation the problem of opposition between finitude and infinity to be anti-Cartesian. Levinas notices, that the Kantian notion of infinity appears as an ideal of reason, the projection of its exigencies in a beyond, that is the ideal completion of what is given incomplete. – "But without the incomplete being confronted with a privileged experience of infinity, without it drawing the limits of its finitude from such a confrontation." The finite here is no longer conceived by relation to the infinite; quite the contrary, the infinite presupposes the finite, which it amplifies infinitely. Kantian finitude is described positively as sensibility, as the Heideggerian finitude of being-for-death. This infinity referring to the finite marks is the most anti-Cartesian point of Kantian philosophy, as, later, of Heideggerian philosophy. Levinas here contrasted himself to Kant in as much as, he differed from Descartes who came to his conclusion because he understood finitude mainly in relation to Infinity. In Kantian ethics, on the contrary, Infinity presupposes the finitude.

The subject of Levinas’s ethics grasps his/her own finitude by "hearing" in the Face of the other the idea of Infinity. At this point he/she questions his/her freedom – this is the starting point of his moral consciousness. "Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent"35.

 1 Stradinis, A. "Ar I. Kanto proteviai kile is kursiu?". – In Problemos, Vilnius, 1987, nr. 36.

 2 Pazeraite, A. "Emmanuelis Levinas ir jo seima Kaune" . – In Zmogus ir zodis. Filosofija. Mokslo darbai. 2001, nr. IV, p. 49.

 3 Lescourret, M.-A. Emmanuel Levinas. – France: Flammarion, 1994, p. 350.

 4 Ibid., p. 380.

 5 Kant, I. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals . – In Kant I. Ethical Philosophy. – Indianapolis.- Indiana: Hackett publishing company, 1983, p. 12. Translated by James W. Ellington.

 6 Levinas, E. Totalite et infini: Essai sur l’exteriorite.- Paris: Kluwer Academic Press, 1971, p. 118. Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity. An Esay on Exteriority. – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1998, p. 114. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

 7 Kant, I. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals . – In Kant I. Ethical Philosophy. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett publishing company, 1983, p. 27. Translated by James W. Ellington.

 8 Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity. An Esay on Exteriority. – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1998, p. 110. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

 9 Ibid., p. 112.

 10Ibid., p. 115.

 11Ibid., p. 119.

 13Ibid., p. xxiv.

 14 Derrida, J. "Violence and Metaphysic" . – In Derrida J. Writing and Difference. – London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 97-98.

 15 Levinas, E. "Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy". – In Levinas E. Outside the Subject. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1949, p. 35.

 16 Levinas, E. "Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism". – In Levinas E. Outside the Subject. – Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1949.

 17 Ibid., p. 17.

 18 Levinas, E. "Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy". – In Levinas E. Outside the Subject.- Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1949, p. 18.

 19 Levinas, E. "Substitution". – In The Levinas Reader. – Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989, p. 119.

 20 Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity. An Esay on Exteriority. – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1998, p. 79. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

 21 Derrida, J. "Violence et metaphysique. Essai sur la pensee d’Emmanuel Levinas" . – In Derrida J. L’ecriture et la difference. – Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971, pp. 129-130.

 22 Taylor, Ch. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. – Cambridge: University Press, 1989, p. 366.

 23 Lévinas, E. Éthique et Infini. Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. – Paris: Fayard, 1982, pp. 97-98.

 24 Derrida, J. "Violence et metaphysique. Essai sur la pensee d’Emmanuel Levinas". – In Derrida J. L’ecriture et la difference. – Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971, p. 137. Cited : Derrida J. "Violence and Metaphysic". – In Derrida J. Writing and Difference. – London: Routledge, 1995, p. 92.

 25 Levinas, E. "Outside the Subject". – In Levinas, E. Outside the Subject. – Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1949, p. 153.

 26 Ibid., p. 158.

 27 Sartre, J.-P. L’etre et le neant. Essai d’ontologie phenomenologique. – Paris: Gallimard, 1943, pp. 292-343.

 28 Foucault, M. Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. – London: Routledge, 1961, pp. 250-251.

 29 Derrida, J. "Violence et metaphysique. Essai sur la pensee d’Emmanuel Levinas". – In Derrida J. L’ecriture et la difference. – Paris: Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1971, p. 147.

 30 Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity. An Esay on Exteriority. – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1998, p. 195. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

 31 Ibid., p. 94.

 32 Derrida, J. "Violence et metaphysique. Essai sur la pensee d’Emmanuel Levinas". – In Derrida J. L’ecriture et la difference. – Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971, p. 127. Cited : Derrida J. "Violence and Metaphysic". – In Derrida J. Writing and Difference. – London: Routledge, 1995, p. 85.

 33 Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity. An Esay on Exteriority. – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1998, p. 195. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

 34 Ricouer, P. Fallible Man. – New York: Fordham University Press, 2000, p. 38.

 35 Ibid., p. 84.