Intervention of the Other

The Intervention of the Other deftly brings the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan into fruitful dialogue through a comparative analysis of these two seemingly disparate thinkers. Emmanuel Levinas, Lithuanian-born French phenomenologist of the non phenomenon, and Jacques Lacan, controversial French psychoanalyst and (post)structuralist theorist of the Freudian Unconscious, lived and wrote in the same city, at the same time, among the same colleagues, often using the same language and the same sources, sometimes writing to the same audiences - and yet they never wrote to or about one another. Following Sartre, Levinas thought that Freud had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of consciousness when he posited the Unconscious as a second but hidden consciousness. Despite this suspicion of psychoanalysis, however, Levinas’ own work celebrated a certain something that could not be contained by thought. For his part, Lacan was suspicious of philosophical ethics. He subscribed to a Freudian critique of ethics as pathogenic. Nevertheless, he saw his own work as fundamentally about a kind of ethics, specifically an ethics concened with how people live their lives.