The focus of this paper is the phenomenological analysis of fatigue in the early writings of Emmanuel Levinas. My main argument is to present the experience of fatigue, or a heaviness of being oneself, not merely as a limit experience, but as the ontological source and condition of a meaningful present. However, in a paradoxical sense, fatigue appears in the analysis of being oneself as an experience that is not yet part of the world of phenomena. As such, the ontological nature of fatigue shows that a meaningful present is constituted by a relation to what Levinas conceives as an invisibility in a particular sense. I argue that this relation reveals a distinctive methodological approach to phenomenology in that it shows that the interplay between visibility and invisibility is the necessary form under which experience presents itself.
R. Uljée (Thu,) studied this question.