Alterity And Diachrony

The structure of time has given the basic horizon for the question of the others in the movement of phenomenology.Though the past phenomenological theories have had many achievements on this question,they don’t give it an important position and especially don’t recognize the absolute alterity of the others.In Levinas’ s opinion,the fundamental reason of this situation is the understanding of time as synchroneity.Specifically,though the past phenomenological theories have liberated time by not viewing it as scale or extension,they ultimately cut off its stream since they fall into the understanding of time as homogeneity and totalization which exists both in Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness and the phenomenology of body raised by Merleau-Ponty etc.In Levinas’ opinion,the original time is diachrony.The future of diachrony opens up in the absolutely heterogeneous “the Other”,and it achieves in the“face to face” with the others.Diachrony is closely related to transcendence,and the latter bases on the internality which is the unity of body and mind.“The Other in the same” that is prehistory of the subject is the immemorial past of diachrony,and the ethical subject as “substitution” achieves the present of time.The diachrony has relation with the “spatiality” of contemporary philosophy as they both emphasizes on alterity and dissolve the homogeneity of the subject.Levinas agrees with Blanchot’s desire for the external experience,but he criticizes the neutralization of the “space of literature” for its anonymous operation closing human into an non-human totality.Levinas insists on temporality and subjectivity that are different from the traditional understanding of them in phenomenology and thus he insists on the subject’s transcendence to break through any totality,which has given the “ethical space” of human.This “ethical space” doesn’t contradict to the “space of the Other” of Foucault,and,its thinking of alterity has profound influence on the tendency of materiality in the contemporary phenomenology.