Abstract
This text tries to compare the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and other phenomenological projects, represented here by the philosophy of M. Heidegger and H.
Maldiney, and identify their major and insurmountable differences. It compares these philosophies on the basis of their different conceptions of transcendence, which signifies the birth of meaningfulness in our being in the world here.
However, I begin my inquiry with the opposite question: Why does Levinas understand being as essentially meaningless? If nonsense is understood here as closing oneself in the totality of being with no escape, as the impossibility to touch otherness and exteriority, i.e. as madness - then Levinas thereby directly implies that phenomenology had not been truly able to describe transcendence. Since the phenomenon of madness was described by Henri Maldiney in principally the same way, it seems to me very useful to identify the reasons why the two philosophies cannot be reconciled.
This text achieves that by focusing on Maldiney's inspiration and on Levinas's opposition to Heidegger's model of mortality as an encounter with radical otherness. This text aims to suggest why Levinas's polemic with phenomenology proceeds by stressing the need of understanding transcendence ethically, as an answer to the death of the other, and not factually as an answer to my own mortality and exposure to Being.