LEVINAS, NANCY, AND THE BEING OF PLURALITY 175 LEVINAS, NANCY, AND THE BEING OF PLURALITY Mark Kourie Benda Hofmeyr Department of Philosophy University of Pretoria, South Africa This essay critically considers the differences and complementarities between Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s respective accounts of ontology and ethics. A comparative reading reveals that while both insist upon a relational conceptualization of subjectivity, they base relationality on differing notions of alterity. The simultaneous proximity and distance between these two thinkers’ respective transphenomological quests yield critical force that enables a mutual critique, while opening up productive avenues for overcoming some of the problems inherent to their views. DELIMITING THE PROBLEMATICS Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, while taking Martin Heidegger as their main interlocuter, provide rigorous critiques of Heidegger’s resuscitation of the question of the meaning of Being (Sein). Where Levinas identifies a grave insufficiency in Heidegger’s ontology, and one which necessitates a metaphysics based upon something “otherwise than Being,” Nancy deconstructs the individualism which haunts Heidegger’s Being and time, and asserts that Heidegger failed to give a sufficient analysis of being- with. The result of this critique yields both thinkers providing an understanding of the necessary limitations of the phenomenological articulation of ontology. Where Levinas’s phenomenology is best understood as a trans-phenomenological quest for the Good beyond Being, showing that ontology is insufficient to motivate ethics, Nancy envisages a theory of Being which questions the legitimacy of presupposing that phenomenology interrogates a world already unified by the ubiquity of Being. Both thinkers, therefore, depart from Heidegger’s existential phenomenology in their respective pursuits of a fundamental or constitutive plurality which supports their complimentary convictions that there cannot be a self without the Other. The particularities of their respective developments and critiques of Heidegger’s thought form the subject of an abundance of scholarship. It will not, however, be our main concern here. It nevertheless constitutes a necessary point of departure for what we will focus on in this essay: the striking similarity between Levinas’s and Nancy’s perspectives of Being, on the one hand, and Φιλοσοφια Φιλοσοφια Φιλοσοφια Φιλοσοφια Φιλοσοφια Volume 17, 2:2016