ABSTRACT
‘Solidarity’ is a term that has recently received a prominent place in a variety of debates in moral and political theory. Yet the term itself, and the philosophical presuppositions that underlie it, often remain obscure. In the following I would like to discuss the idea of solidarity in its relation to the norms of symmetry and reciprocity, specifically as this relation is developed in discourse ethics. I will then present the ethical reflections of Emmanuel Lévinas as a way of suggesting that the ‘symmetrical solidarity’ that discourse ethics discovers in the pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation encounter their limit in the experience of the concrete injurability of an other, which has an inherently asymmetrical character.
