Reconfiguring ontology: Transcendence, subjectivity, and being in Levinas's early philosophy

This dissertation presents Levinas's philosophy in the period 1929-1940 as a distinct ontology, in contrast to the tendency to read his earliest work through the lens of his later ethical philosophy. Although Levinas's thought in this period is marked by a 1933 rupture with Heidegger, the critical movement of his philosophy remains ontological, reconfiguring the meaning and structures of being. In Levinas's early studies of Husserl and Heidegger (1929-1932), his original thought develops through the characteristic themes of subjectivity and transcendence, understood not ethically, but as a theory of being. It is through the problematic of the subject's transcendence that we can understand Levinas's early enthusiasm for Heidegger's ontology, how his interpretation of Husserl's phenomenology is parasitic on that ontology, and how Heidegger constitutes for Levinas a response to the shortcomings (idealism and intellectualism) of Husserl's thought.;The context of Levinas's early reception of Heidegger was a polarized worldview which pitted ontological against idealist philosophy, along with associated cultural and political forces, as evinced by events and writings in the period 1929-1933. Consequently, Levinas's 1934 writings not only display the rupture occasioned by Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism---recognizing the collapse of transcendence and freedom in his philosophy---but also inherit a theory of being read in terms of biological life. Being is described as the tragic enchainment of corporeal existence, against which the efforts of idealism to sustain a meaningful freedom and subjectivity remain intellectually necessary but existentially doomed. In 1935, Levinas continues this meditation, postulating an escape from being that inverts Heideggerian transcendence yet, far from anticipating a new transcendence beyond being, is ontologically identical with the impossibility of fleeing being. Being itself is indivisibly enchainment and escape.;Levinas opposes Heidegger with his own "counter-ontology," understanding the subject, being, and eventually transcendence through existential structures analogous to Heidegger's. These structures are retained through 1940, but their meaning and unity reconfigured. Being is understood as etre rive---being riveted---the modes of which include the aforementioned enchainment and escape, as well as a conception of the facticity of identity derived from Levinas's writings on Judaism in the later 1930s.