Otherness (Alterity)
Poststructuralism represents a profound challenge to humanist values and enlightenment rationality. These are identified as having formed the ideological medium in which the violence of modern times is deeply rooted. Modernism's tragedy is judged to be a direct consequence of the repression of alterity, and poststructuralists have insisted that attention to what has been lost, silenced or repressed offers the best hope of regeneration.
Heather Walton. "Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology" in Heather Walton and Andrew W. Hass, eds, Self/Same/Other: Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 11.
Emmanuel Levinas's . . . call to discern in the "face of the other" not self-likeness but irradicable strangeness makes possible the imaging of an ethics based upon difference rather than solidarity. Such an ethics rejects the attempt to draw the other into the territory of the same and celebrates a journey beyond the confines of the self towards that which challenges identity at its core. For Levinas it is the desire for the other which calls the self into being as it journeys beyond its own territory into a strange land.
Levinas is Jewish and his work is an extended reflection upon the rise of fascism and its legacy. His thoughts constitute a philosophical protest against the dark thread in humanist thinking which culminates in efforts to eradicate those elements which appear to lie outside the bounds of a possible incorporation into the common identity of the dominant group. Out of his oppposition to totalizing political and philosophical systems he discerns in the desire for the other the possibility of encounter with the sacred Other. The strangeness of human meeting deepens into the mystery of encounter with the divine.
The work of Levinas is woven from a religious inheritance in which the face of God is both hidden and sought out. He uses the Abrahamic motif to describe the formation of the self through a journey into an unknown place. No destination is achieved and there is no possibility of return.
Walton, Heather. "Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology" in Heather Walton and Andrew W. Hass, eds, Self/Same/Other: Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 32-3.
Poststructuralism represents a profound challenge to humanist values and enlightenment rationality. These are identified as having formed the ideological medium in which the violence of modern times is deeply rooted. Modernism's tragedy is judged to be a direct consequence of the repression of alterity, and poststructuralists have insisted that attention to what has been lost, silenced or repressed offers the best hope of regeneration.
Heather Walton. "Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology" in Heather Walton and Andrew W. Hass, eds, Self/Same/Other: Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 11.
Emmanuel Levinas's . . . call to discern in the "face of the other" not self-likeness but irradicable strangeness makes possible the imaging of an ethics based upon difference rather than solidarity. Such an ethics rejects the attempt to draw the other into the territory of the same and celebrates a journey beyond the confines of the self towards that which challenges identity at its core. For Levinas it is the desire for the other which calls the self into being as it journeys beyond its own territory into a strange land.
Levinas is Jewish and his work is an extended reflection upon the rise of fascism and its legacy. His thoughts constitute a philosophical protest against the dark thread in humanist thinking which culminates in efforts to eradicate those elements which appear to lie outside the bounds of a possible incorporation into the common identity of the dominant group. Out of his oppposition to totalizing political and philosophical systems he discerns in the desire for the other the possibility of encounter with the sacred Other. The strangeness of human meeting deepens into the mystery of encounter with the divine.
The work of Levinas is woven from a religious inheritance in which the face of God is both hidden and sought out. He uses the Abrahamic motif to describe the formation of the self through a journey into an unknown place. No destination is achieved and there is no possibility of return.
Walton, Heather. "Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology" in Heather Walton and Andrew W. Hass, eds, Self/Same/Other: Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 32-3.
posted by Dr Gwynith Young at 5:18 PM
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