Economics and the Other: The line between two worlds in the philosophy by H. Arendt and E. Levinas

Abstract

In the philosophy of Arendt and Levinas, one's attention is drawn to the parallelism in the way they put forward the "concealment" / "interiority", correlated with the "economy" that was originally understood, as opposed to the space where the meeting with the other(s) occurs. Similarity, however, ends where they specify what lies beyond the "economic" and who this other is. If for Arendt, existence outside the «economy» is one of the activity, for Levinas the true face-to-face relation is fundamentally different from any action.