Sound and Exteriority in the Inedited Works of Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

Levinas’s Wartime Notebooks although written between 1937 and 1949 were only published in 2012. His annotations of those years, mostly written while a prisoner of war, offer us the opportunity to assist at the birth and the maturing process of some of his key concepts. We will focus on three fundamental elements that clarify the conditions that influenced his thinking and his discovery of transcendence. These elements will outline: a phenomenology of the body in its corporality; a phenomenology of the senses with hearing as a fundamental prototype; his experience of suffering reflected in his human passivity that dominated the years of imprisonment. Starting with these, some embryonic elements of a rethinking of ontology will be clarified.