BARATA, André. Lévinas, Husserl and Damásio: from otherness as experience to experience as otherness. Estud. pesqui. psicol. []. 2008, 8, 2. ISSN 1808-4281.

The present article is divided into four parts. I will begin by distinguishing three meanings of exteriority, so as to illuminate Lévinas’ own concept of exteriority, as expounded in the essay Totality and Infinity and with which the terms otherness and experience are associated. I phrase it in this way so as to avoid specifying each of these terms, which I will attempt to clarify throughout the second and third parts. First, I will discuss otherness as experience, experience of the other, but non-perceptive, pre-intentional experience, prior even to the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness. Then, by inverting the order of the terms, I will address experience as otherness, i.e., experience which, while not ceasing to be experience, remains a relation of otherness. Lévinas writes in Totality and Infinity: “experience means precisely the relation with the absolute other.”¹ Within the frame of that discussion, I will comment on the levinasianresponse to the fifth of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, and finally bring together Lévinas’ thought and the neurological research of António Damásio. In the last section I will explore different ways to maintain the following paradox - surface has no depth: surface is depth.

: Otherness; Experience; Exteriority/Interiority; Sensibility.

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