Aristotle tells us that one way of understanding a given term is to understand its opposite. What is the opposite of “other”? A dictionary might indicate “same”. In phenomenology, this seemingly banal distinction has taken on momentous proportions, mostly thanks to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995).             A key theme in the thought of Levinas is our radical incapacity to make space for the other, for what is not the same as us. He strongly denounces this chronic tendency to totalize the self. The totalitarianism of the Nazis, for instance, (which he encountered indirectly through the killing of some members of his family) is for him but the ultimate outward expression of a much more banal form of totalitarianism that dominates human life.             Let us take a simple example. Two women are in the cancer ward of a hospital: Jean: How are you today, love? Ann: Not too well. My left arm is really painful. It feels as if it is burning. Jean: I know all about that. You have no idea how sore my foot was last night… What is depicted on a nano scale in this scene occurs daily, hourly, on a micro, meso and…

            At first sight it might seem strange to discuss I for intersubjectivity before discussing S for subject (which we will do in due course). The fact is that intersubjectivity arrives not just alphabetically before subjectivity but is also ontologically prior: no one ever became a subject on her own.             In order to understand why this is so we need to begin with the crucial phenomenological critique of the “subject-object” model of knowing. This model, which is at the basis of the empirical sciences and thus also of modernity in general, has been shown (by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and many others) to be extremely reductive in nature. It greatly underestimates the complexity of what it means to be a subject, what it means to be an object and what it means for the two to be in relation to each other (in a world).             If all this is true of subjectivity, it is not difficult to imagine how much greater is the complexity when we think of intersubjectivity (not forgetting the chronological order mentioned above). These same thinkers were quite perplexed at the very possibility of intersubjectivity. They took “solipsism” and “ego-ology” very seriously. If I and…