Ethical-Linguistic constitution of clinical subjectivities: a Lévinasian perspective

Abstract Introduction This article explores the clinical encounter not merely as a site for technical intervention or diagnostic reasoning, but as a complex event where epistemology and ethics converge. Challenging the reduction of medicine to scientific protocols, it argues for a conceptual reorientation grounded in language and human relationality. The encounter between clinician and patient is framed as both an epistemic inquiry and a moral covenant, where understanding a patient’s condition requires access not only to biological data but to their social, cultural, and linguistic lifeworld. While the sciences offer truth about the body, they do not suffice to grasp the full existential dimension of illness. Language thus becomes central—not only as a medium of communication, but as the very space where knowledge and care are shaped and shared. It is in and through language that ethical responsibility toward the patient is enacted. Method This article synthesizes a philosophical investigation into the ethical and linguistic foundations of medical practice. Drawing on the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Émile Benveniste, Emmanuel Levinas, and decolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, it develops a theoretical framework that helps to clarify how subjectivity, vulnerability, and responsibility emerge in and through language during the clinical encounter. The approach is conceptual and interpretive, grounded in close textual analysis and oriented toward the ethical implications of these philosophical insights within the medical practice. Findings From this analysis emerges a critique of dominant ontological assumptions within Western medicine, particularly its tendency to assimilate the Other into pre-existing categories, thereby enacting a form of epistemic violence. Levinas’s distinction between the Said (le Dit) and the Saying (le Dire) becomes central to this critique. The Said corresponds to propositional knowledge and thematic discourse—typical of clinical reasoning—while the Saying signals a more primordial ethical relation: an act of exposure, vulnerability, and responsibility toward the Other. Proximity, as defined by Levinas, is not a spatial or cognitive closeness but an ethical immediacy—a face-to-face relation where the Other appears as irreducibly singular. Humboldt’s and Benveniste’s linguistic theories reinforce this view by emphasizing that subjectivity is dialogical and relational rather than autonomous and pregiven. In contrast to Habermas’s emphasis on validity claims and rational consensus, Levinas privileges the irreducible alterity of the Other as the foundation of ethical life, a move that reframes the conditions under which medical knowledge and care become possible. Discussion These philosophical insights have profound implications for the medical practice. When in a clinical encounter, the patients do not merely present symptoms to be categorized—they bring a world that demands ethical attention. Medical language, far from being neutral, reconfigures how illness is understood and treated. The difference between saying a patient “has diabetes,” “suffers from diabetes,” or “is diabetic” reflects deeper assumptions about identity and embodiment. The ethical quality of care hinges on such linguistic choices. Through the lens of Levinas’s Saying, the patient’s voice is heard not simply as information but as a call to responsibility. Moreover, when placed in conversation with decolonial thinkers, this analysis reveals the extent to which colonial and racialized logics continue to shape medical practice. Fanon’s critique of the objectification of Black bodies, and Glissant’s defense of “opacity” against totalizing knowledge systems, highlight how patients are often forced into identities that obscure their singularity. The ethical demand of the clinical encounter thus resists any framework—biological, social, or racial—that seeks to fully determine the patient in advance of relation. Conclusion The article concludes that ethical responsibility in medicine arises not from what is known about the patient, but from a willingness to engage with what remains unknown and unknowable—their singularity, vulnerability, and alterity. The clinical encounter is reimagined as a moral space where language becomes the medium through which care is not only delivered but ethically constituted. In this reconfiguration, the practice of medicine moves beyond procedural norms and toward a relational ethics rooted in proximity and attentiveness. By bringing together Levinas’s philosophy of language and responsibility with decolonial critiques of medical rationality, the article calls for a fundamental transformation in how healing is conceived: not as mastery over the body, but as a dialogical and ethical relation between singular beings.