Transcendence and sensibility: affection, sensation, and nonintentional consciousness
ENUnderscoring the importance of sensibility in Levinas’s philosophy, she shows that subjectivity is not only a vulnerable and affected selfhood but also that, in and through, its sensible subjectivity is endowed with transcendence. Affected by the other, the vulnerability and sensibility of selfhood are “nonintentional” and radically passive. By introducing the phenomenon of a sensibility with two distinct dimensions—one on the level of enjoyment and the other on the suffering of the face- to-face encounter—she shows the double character of affection, both constituting and constituted. Sensibility is both source and shocked in the face-to-face relation. Elaborating sensibility as enjoyment and sensibility as nonintentional consciousness and passivity, Poleshchuk deepens our understanding of the core Levinasian structures of one- for-the-other and hospitality. In contrast to the idealistic leanings of philosophy’s ontological tradition, Poleshchuk shows that transcendence in Levinas’s ethical philosophy becomes flesh in sensibility.
