The Other and the Structure of Experience: Between Blanchot and Levinas

The aim of the paper is the comparison of the conceptions of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, which should serve as a basis of the further contemplation of the relationship between thinking and experience. The shared critical view of the phenomenological interpretation of experience leads both philosophers to an alternative conception. in which experience transcends thinking and in face of such an experience the reality is an alterity. However. the experience of alterity, which underlines the wholeness and temporal unity of all human thinking, is conceived differently. resulting in different conceptions of subjectivity. With Levinas the dominating role is played by human kind as the opposite of the nonhuman, while with Blanchot the dichotomy is dissolved. I lis conception is thus a challenge to conceive the experience, thinking and reality beyond the human/nonhuman dichotomy