Altérité anarchique – Réconciliation de Descartes et Kant dans la dernière pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

This paper considers the anarchical alterity that Emmanuel Levinas discusses in a continuation of the great tradition of critical philosophy, beginning with Descartes and Kant. In this vein, we examine the concept of self-criticism or the criticism of knowledge by knowledge itself, which we consider to be an axis of the whole corpus of Levinas ’ work. Already presented in Totality and Infinity (1961), this notion is reformulated in Otherwise than Being or Beyond the Essence (1974) on the one hand, in the continuity of Totality and Infinity, and on the other hand, in the radical discontinuity of this work. We clarify this transformation of self-criticism as a conciliation of Cartesian proof of the existence of God and its Kantian critique from which we explain the necessity of anarchy of the alterity.