A partire da Levinas: ripensare il terzo, per un’etica della reciprocità

The current research work Starting with Levinas: rethinking the third, for the ethics of re-ciprocity, propose itself as a reflexion around ehe ethical status of reciprocity. The question of the third that constitutes the theoretical background of this study take shape and develops through historiographical approach that finds in Emmanuel Levinas a privileged interlocutor. The study endeavors to reconstruct some of the fundamental moments of Levinas’s work through which is possible to highlights the theoretical premises at the heart of his conception of the third. Concentrating on those advertises that render a concrete exercise of responsibility that could be extended to “anybody and everybody” with no exclusion, difficult. The main aim of our research is to suggest an itinerary that, bearing in mind the notion of the third as the theoretical hypothesis and developing it through a thematic approach, allows to assign to reciprocity, the ethic of inclusive recognition. The difficulties which Levinas’s conception of third shows, are re-read and interpreted through the double dialogue with Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy. Such double dialogue will allow to delve more in depth and highlight both the reciproci-ty as an indispensable category of the relationship and the “sharing” as participation to an origin that unifies without necessarily obliterating each individual’s specific differen-ce. The results transpired from the authors comparison will be further developed according to the primary hypothesis that is the background of the whole work. If the concept of third is regarded as a triadic paradigm that does not exclude a link to transcendence, it allows to unite proximity and distance as it will lead to a different de-clination of intersubjectivity, in which the imperialism of the subject is overshadowed by that of the other. In such perspective not the I, nor the Other, are able to vindicate the origin of the rela-tionship. However both parties recognize themselves in the participation of a “third par-ty” of which they do not “possess” the condition of possibility. If what is original is not the I as in self, nor the Other, but is, in fact, the relation itself, it means that both esta-blish themselves in the net of an original intersubjectivity in which the identity is, struc-turally, one of relation. Such interpretative key, taken on and analyzed while trying to introduce ourselves in the horizon of a wider research perspective, is spurred by the belief that, if the third, not only is viewed as a triadic paradigm but is also radicalized through a connection to transcendence, has the ability to honor an unlimited inclusive opening as, on one hand it presents itself as a condition in itself of the relationship, on the other hand, as the “empi-rical person” of which I am responsible and to whom I answer. The development of these premises will be conducive to the identification, within the notion of third, of a universally recognized participatory bond that will find its funda-mental principle in the concept of “common good”, with the ability to introduce an ho-rizon in which “sharing” and participation portray a scenario in which inclusion is always possible.