The Concept of Text in Levinas's Philosophy of Language

As a phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas's main topic is the phenomenology of alterity, and his most famous achievement is the phenomenological description of the ethical relationship between the same and the other. But as a well-known interpreter of the Talmud, he also provided a hermeneutical paradigm. In this article. I purport to argue that, though he rarely discusses the problem of text, there is certainly a kind of theory of text in his works, and we can demonstrate it by means of his philosophy of language, especially the concepts of the saying and the said. According to the threefold structure of "the same-the other-the third," I firstly describe the violence of understanding through Levinas's critique of Heidegger's ontology. Second, I investigate the ethics of interpretation in terms of Levinas's moral metaphysics and his religious reflection about the revelation of the other. Finally I extend the responsibility of interpretation into the realm of politics. Through the politics of sermon, we can clarify the social dimension of text and integrate text and people into an interpretative community.