La questione dell’alterità tra Lévinas e Heidegger

Abstract

I wish to address in this essay Levinas’s critique of Heidegger around the question of alterity. Heideggerian “ontology” is often described by Levinas as solipsistic, eclipsing the other in its focus on the meaning of being. I reconstruct this critique, draw some of its limits, and proceed to consider a Heideggerian philosophy of alterity that paradoxically would not be so far from Levinas’s own account, while avoiding some metaphysical structures plaguing Levinas’s thought. In fact, it might be the case that alterity proves to be the most proper problem of being: if for Heidegger being is a “secret,” he may then be closest to Levinas, to the extent that, as Derrida wrote, “the other is secret insofar as it is other”.