Addressing Levinas

The Other Side of Intentionality

In critiquing Western philosophy, Levinas engages himself largely with the phenomenological tradition which construes subjectivity in terms of intentionality. Against the background of this critique, Levinas offers an alternative account of subjectivity as sensibility, which receives its most explicit formulation in Otherwise Than Being but is thematic in a number of shorter pieces leading up to this work.1 Although Levinas is critical of phenomenology, his work remains strikingly phenomenological, and his debt to Husserl is substantial. Indeed, I suspect that Levinas’s work represents more of a radicalization of phenomenology than a destruction of it. Accordingly, I would expect the idea he puts forward of subjectivity as sensibility to be linked to the idea of subjectivity as intentionality. In this paper I will trace this linkage, first, by investigating the emergence of the notion of sensibility out of Husserl’s notion of sensation; and, second, by exploring how Levinas attempts to effect a reversal of intentional subjectivity in the notion of proximity. Levinas strives to differentiate intentionality from the relation with the other with which he is concerned. The discussions of proximity in Otherwise Than Being and of desire in Totality and Infinity2 are motivated by the contrast with intentionality.3 Moreover, Levinas distinguishes the intentional object, which signifies as a phenomenon, from the face, which signifies as a trace or enigma. A phenomenon acts as a sign which makes the essence of the object present to consciousness, thereby allowing the subject to glide over the object in its singularity toward its universal meaning . The Other as enigma signifies in a way which does not make present or does not make anything transparent. The Other presents itself as absent or withdrawn; it is beyond the grasp of consciousness.4 This “beyond” is something which Levinas maintains cannot be thought within the domain of intentionality. Intentionality entails a relaThe Other Side of Intentionality Leslie MacAvoy 109 tion in which the subject is oriented toward the object or phenomenon, the essence or being of which is disclosed to varying degrees to the subject . Through the application of techniques of phenomenological reduction , the essence of the object can be more fully disclosed and grasped by the subject. This essence is the meaning of the object and is always graspable in principle, if not in fact. According to accounts of subjectivity based on intentionality, the meaning of the phenomenon is equated with its being or essence, and furthermore, the being of a phenomenon lies in its presentation to consciousness. This implies that there is effectively no meaning which in principle outstrips consciousness; nothing lies beyond consciousness. From Levinas’s perspective this is problematic, for it indicates that there is no beyond, there is no infinite, there is no alterity. But rather than abandoning the phenomenological perspective altogether , Levinas searches for evidence that this intentional subjectivity is actually founded on something else which itself cannot be comprehended by consciousness and incorporated into ontology. Levinas finds what he is looking for in Husserl’s notion of sensation.5 As Levinas reads Husserl, the sensible content which is given in an act of intuition is necessary for being to be present and for an intention to be fulfilled. This sensible content is founded on the stream of lived experience, Erlebnisse, which is not thought, but simply provides the background for what is thought.6 The implication , then, is that the sensuality of lived experience lies behind intentional acts of consciousness and contributes necessarily to their meaning. This stream of lived experience is effectuated through a non-thematizing consciousness characterized by the intentionality of retention and protention . Through retention and protention, consciousness makes sensations, which are already past or which have not yet occurred, present to it such that experience is made coherent and continuous rather than fragmented into single moments of sensuous impression. Thus, temporal consciousness and consciousness of sensation are intimately linked.7 The upshot is that there is always a temporal gap between a sensation and the consciousness of that sensation such that consciousness is always recalling what has already passed in the stream of lived experience. Husserl realizes that none of this would be possible were the subject not corporeally situated and participating in a world. As Levinas puts it: “the subject faces the object and is in complicity with it; the corporeity of consciousness is in exact proportion to this participation of consciousness in the world it constitutes , but this corporeity is produced in sensation” (“IS” 145). These sensations are kinesthetic and...