The self is constituted through intersubjective contact rather than through autonomous self-reflection.

Two additional innovations in Otherwise than Being include: (1) the proposed phenomenological reduction to the birth of meaning in a bodily self that carries what it cannot identify as properly itself (the “other”, affectively). This appears to be a radicalization of Husserl’s discussion of the pre-reflective ego in Ideas II (§58, “Supplement 12” §§2–3). Whereas Husserl emphasized the basis of the ego in its ongoing flow of lived experience, which he said was “lawful”, Levinas focuses on the dis