The Early Levinas and Heidegger

ENJean-Michel Salanskis discusses Levinas’s early reading of Heidegger, which he shows is already characterized by a deep reluctance to embrace the Heideggerian framework concerning Being. Salanskis also shows that Levinas’s rejection of Heidegger amounts to a recovery not of traditional idealism as such, stemming from Plato, but of its underlying motivation, namely, the attempt to escape being and the facticity of the body. This renewed emphasis on the subject “outside of being,” rather than the reverse, according to Salanskis, is what provides Levinas with a way into his later thinking regarding the otherwise than being.