Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas identifies Husserl’s lectures on the internal consciousness of time as of central phenomenological importance. However, Levinas gives two different readings of these lectures: the first argues that Husserl’s concept of the proto-impression is the receptivity of sensation that provides the basis for intentional constitution. The second reading, by contrast, argues that Husserl’s account is ultimately bound to the category of the Same, as whatever enters consciousness is not put into question. Most commentators either conflate the readings or interpret them as an ambiguity in Levinas’s thought. I argue to the contrary that while Levinas sees Husserl’s account as an advance in the articulation of the otherness presented to us in the world of perception and how such otherness funds consciousness, he claims that Husserl’s presentation of internal time consciousness is unsuitable to account for the ethical relationship with the other person. Thus, Levinas’s two readings mark out how Husserl’s description of temporal consciousness can and cannot be used in articulating the ways in which the ego is decentered by otherness.