Abstract
In his late philosophy, Levinas finds that the human being, along with his body, is constituted by "sensibility as proximity, as signification, as one-for-the-other, which signifies in giving"; otherwise he or she is not human. For Levinas, therefore, it is also an affectivity, which, in its bind to the Other, opens up as a sensitivity to the Other.
The Other is what animates affectivity. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, "the passage to the physico-chemico-physiological meanings of the body", that is prepared by "sensibility as proximity, as signification, as one-for-the-other", as the materialization of the body, is now exclusively reabsorbed in ethical signification.
Nevertheless, the article shows some other figures of incarnation in the earlier works of Levinas as well: the position and the enjoyment.