Mirtis ir laikas: pasyvumo ištakų link
Death and Time: Towards the Origin of Passivity

Summary/Abstract: The author of this article tries to reflect on the limitary phenomenon of death by using another, also limitary phenomenon of passivity of time experience. This research follows the intuition that passivity of time experience indicates the work of death that takes place at the very base of subjectivity. The article analyses phenomenological researches of temporality by E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, and E. Levinas that enabled the explication of passivity of temporal experience as facticity, non-authenticity in authenticity and asynchrony of time. The deepest layer or substratum of Husserl’s subjectivity, negatively described as the boundary of reflection as well as the phenomenon of thrownness described by Heidegger already grasps the passivity of time experience to certain extent, which can be specified as being in spite of oneself. However, these efforts are directed towards the reactivity of the passivity (stressing the sphere of „I can”). It seems that Levinas makes a step in the opposite direction: not towards the overcoming of passivity, but towards the increasing of it (my being, described as being without identity, takes the form of being for the sake of the other). This step provides passivity with different meaning, not the one of potentiality. But what does this step mean to phenomenology - description of limitary experience or inversion of the notion of experience? The question is raised how the affirmation of nonreactivated passivity is related to the very possibility of phenomenological description.

• Details
• Contents