Perhaps a "technical" comment. Phenomenology was staged as a philosophical analysis of meaning and an account of its "constitution", initially through an analysis of intentionality that referred meaning to consciousness understood as a cognitive state. (In fact, one of the standard criticisms of phenomenology is that it conflates or fails to adequately distinguish truth from meaning). Levinas anti-phenomenological phenomenology, through its reversal of intentionality uncovers the modal-relational dimension of meaning "constitution" in the relation to the other which "necessarily" subtends any "constitutive" performances of any intentionality of consciousness, no matter how hermeneutically conceived, and the discursive/conceptual rationality it would underwrite. What I would want to remark is that this is a fundamentally new philosophical discovery, perhaps the first truly fundamental discovery since Plato inaugurated the philosophical tradition, with the discovery of the quasi-systematic implicature of the world to be uncovered through logic and dialectics. And it not only displaces/dissolves any transcendental or epistemological project, with which phenomenology first began, but it penetrates, disrupts, and uproots the "solidity" of the Logos, in the ontological and epistemological guises that it has taken in Western philosophy, with their cognitive-rational implicatures, through the modal dimension that traverses them, without negating or denying such cognitive rationality. The implication of that discovery is diffuse but potentially large, for not only does it put paid to the epistemological project of philosophical certification, or any transcendental projection, but it calls into question any dialectical process which would ultimately rely on a perspective of perspectives, be it the "absolute knowledge" of the philosopher and the future triumph of the revolutionary proletariat, that would trump all other perspectives. The modal "saying" that always accompanies and underlies the "said" leads on the the movement of "unsaying" and "resaying" the "said", with no final "last word", which could trump the potential modal transformations of human relationships.

But the discovery of the modal is not Levinas' alone, but was already uncovered, in a different philosophical/cultural context, by Wittgenstein in "P.I.", where he not only mentions numerous different types of utterances,- reports, commands, jokes, requests, etc.-, but there are specific paragraphs where he shows, without naming, what his epigones in speach-act theory would call "illocutionary force", since he still maintains the "Tractatus" distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown, and, indeed, with due philosophical rigor, since the "saying" precisely is what can not be said. Which brings up the force and status of the so-called "private language argument", which I would maintain is pre-logical and non-transcendental yet peculiarly "shows" the "logical" impossibility of any such thing, since it's whole point is that any notion of a private language is unconstruable, as such. (The choice of the example of pain sensation/attribution is probably overdetermined, since it straddles any dualistic temptation as to whether pain is a physical or mental phenomenon, but also it "strategically" brings out the perverse inferences, even sadism, of skeptical/solipsitic objections, such as "yes, I can see that he is in pain, but how can I know his pain itself?"). The irony of the "private language argument" is that it is the very publicness of language the renders (the recognition of) privacy possible, even as that publicness is woven out of a fragile tissue of private experiences, coordinations and promptings. Stanley Cavell in "The Claim of Reason" put it this way:

"I find my general intuition of Wittgenstein's view of language to be the reverse of the idea many philosophers seem compelled to argue against in him: it is felt that Wittgenstein's view makes language too public, that it cannot do justice to the control over I have over what I say, to the innerness of my meaning. But my wonder, in the face of what I have been recently saying,is rather how he can arrive at the completed and unshakeable edifice of shared language from within such apparently fragile and intimate moments- private moments- as our separate counts and out-calls of phenomena, which are after all hardly more than our interpretations of what occurs, and with no assurance of conventions to back them up."

That's the last paragraph of Chapter 1, and I just spent a few hours this afternoon re-reading chapters 2-4. I could help but be struck again by how closely his reading of Wittgenstein parallels the concerns of Levinas, especially with respect to the simultanous inevitability and impossibility of philosophical skepticism, as foreshadowing and haunting the relation to the other. Wittgenstein's appeal to the "grammar" of a shared form of life offers a different emphasis from Levinas' insistence on the inexpungible ambiguity of ethical transcendence and the estrangement, whereby I attain the singularity of my individuation through the assumption of responsibility before the other, which paradoxically "grounds" sociality through the impossibility of "ontological solitude". (There is a point of comparison and difference with Hegel here, as alienation, as a passing-over into otherness, has, in part, a "positive" value as "Bildung", where one rises above one's narrow self-interested egotism to attain a more universal and public perspective.) But it's doubtful Wittgenstein didn't maintain his "unsayable" ethical intention from the "Tractatus", as well.