Two Ways to the Outside

Abstract

Are Lévinas and Deleuze two allies in their effort to break away from the Western ontology, which is based on the logic of the One and the Same, or do their philosophies represent two distant galaxies? The purpose of this paper is not to argue for either possibility, but to show the issue in all its complexity. Conjunctions as well as disjunctions of Lévinas' metaphysical thinking and Deleuze's nomadic philosophy should be dealt with on the background of the problems of sexual difference and human face that play an important part in both conceptions. The analysis of these phenomena shall allow us to see the common denominator of both philosophical conceptions in the relation of thought to the outside, even though they approach the outside in two different ways.