Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida

4 Phenomenology, Openness, and Ethics as First Philosophy

This chapter explores Levinas's relationship to phenomenology. It begins by offering a summary of his criticisms of phenomenology. Next, it argues that Levinas understood these criticisms to be occasioned by phenomenology itself. By focusing on Husserl's accounts of intentionality, sensibility, and impression, Levinas provides a re-imagination of phenomenology that attempts to be more faithful to phenomenology's foundational impulses. This manifests itself most clearly in Levinas's understanding of his work as offering a reversal of Sinngebung [sense-bestowal]-rather than the subject bestowing sense on the world, Levinas comes to see that sense is first bestowed on the subject. This phenomenological re-reading is central to Levinas's entire project of ethics as first philosophy.