The fourth Kant's antinomy and the odyssey of Levinas' subject

This article is focused on the problem of self-identity suggested by Emamnuel Levinas. Author starts from the presupposition that Levinas created a new concept of identity, not reducible to any one elaborated by Western thought. Nevertheless Levinas takes the starting point from the fourth antinomy elaborated by Kant. Kant, like Edmund Husserl, was concerned in the transcendental subject. Georg Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre considered the problem of personal identity as self-counsciousness, namely as the posibility of consciousness to return to itself (pour soi). Levinas, on the other side, opposes such a possibility of return. He encourages his philosophical subject to leave his own self for a permanent journey never to return back. The article deals with the question how this new identity as a substitution of the other person (autrui) by oneself, as being a hostage instead of him could be theoreticaly related with the fourth antinomy of Kant. The author comes to a conclusion that by this antinomy Levinas helped his own philosophical subject to free oneself from the bondage of the sequence of time. This new subject, released from the dinamic sequence of time, needs the otherness of the other person, because the otherness of the second moment could not be included into a lonely subject. So Levinas included sociality into the question of time. Time is socially created. In this movement of thought Levinas returns back to the pre-philosophical sources one can find in the novels of Dostoyevsky. Such crucial dimensions of new Levinas' subjects as vulnerability, passivity, letting oneself being obsessed and persecuted by the other could not be derived from the tradition of Western reflection dealing with the topic of personal identity.