Abstract
when confronting the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, we can either side with Levinas, i.e. claim that Merleau-Ponty embraced an "ontology of anonymous being" and failed to recognize the ethical meaning of asymmetrical encounters, or we can - together with Merleau-Ponty and some of his readers - refuse to conceive the other as "entirely separate from us and fetishized in its externality". The chapter describes this contrast as a dissent between a philosophy which takes alterity to be fundamentally external, and a philosophy which understands alterity to be both internal and external.
While the "Idea of the Infinite" and the concept of "radical separation" in Levinas aims at the other as the one who falls in from the outside, the phenomenology of transformative experiences in Merleau-Ponty shows the otherness of the other always in relation to our own otherness. Alterity thus implies a possible alteration of the self which never completely owns itself.
On this reading, the very idea of the Same in Levinas loses its foundation, as well as the idea of the absolute externality does.