Pensar o corpo outramente: corpo e linguagem no itinerário de Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

This work investigates the problem of body and language in Emmanuel Levina’s philosophy. Therefore, we sought to reconstruct the Levinasian thought about the body, which goes from existence to essence and from essence to existence. In this context, the body is thought outside knowledge totality. As a result, we evidenced that the author's thought is accomplished as an abandonment of the first Husserl’s intentional phenomenology and the Dasein existential analytics of Heidegger’s Ontology. This, however, does not mean that Levinas has denied the role of Phenomenology masters in the reinsertion of the body issue in the contemporary Philosophy context. Three axes support the framework in which the problem of this research is placed: i) the existence as a locus from which the issue of essence is stated, brought to Philosophy scene by the ontophenomenological turning point; ii) the body, in Levinas work, in the context of this philosophical turning point, conjugated to the Jewish tradition of otherness; and iii) the language anchored in the problem of face-to-face and melee relationship with the Other. We hypothesize that the problem of the body in Levina’s work can not be thought outside the relationship with the Other, who is flesh/body. This relationship is eminently ethical language. Hence, the body is an assumption for language, which is used by the author to approach the ethical corporeality issue. Therefore, considering that language in Levinas work, mainly after Totalité et Infini, is characterized beyond the essence, this research aims to formulate the thesis of a semioethics in the author’s writings, understood as a theory of signs that comes as ethics due to language as the responsiveness of the me-sign in-accusative towards the Other. This presupposes the resumption of language metaphorical character, as Levinas thinks, to show that metaphor refers to the body itself, as a sign for the Other. This is certainly what allows the philosopher to escape possible pitfalls of logic and language of being and to point to the otherwise than being and his eminently ethical language. We emphasize, however, that postulating a semioethics in Levinas works only makes sense if it is thought in an ethical language of the body said otherwise.