Irreducible psychical modalities: the primal negation in Levinas' thought

The paper aims to examine the ambiguity of the phenomenological concept of modality in Levinas' thought. First of all, we consider the heideggerian's thesis in which human subjectivity is a modality of the manifestation of being. Husserl's concept of intentional consciousness will be interpreted according to this thesis. Secondly, we examine the irreducible psychical modalities discovered and described in exemplar way by Husserl's phenomenology itself. This irreducible consciousness, which access is given by the phenomenological method itself, is not the modality of being, but of otherwise than being. However, the key to understand this consciousness is the primal phenomenon of negation. In our perspective, Levinas' thesis is not so far from Husserl's thesis, although the distance between them must be preserved.