[Reader-list] The Levinas Interlude

[abir bazaz]

ALTERITY AND OBLIGATION TO AND FOR THE OTHER

Alterity, the otherness of the other, gives obligation. Alterity, in the face of the disappearance of God, now traces itself across the face of the other person. Divine inversion has now produced a work of human inversion, a reversal of each ego's relationship to itself, so that now each self, having lost its ties to the origin, finds itself only other and utterly alien. It is this for it is only what it is by being other and not itself. This is by no means a Hegelian self-difference that calls out to identity, but an absolute difference, an identity whose identity is difference. Now, when all identity is difference, the self cannot lodge within itself, finding there a restful space of introspection. One finds, now, that the inner is the outer. The other, no longer transcendent, is the seat of the psyche. Therefore now, expenditure, which is the gift of creation, has no other direction than toward the other. This obligation to the other is the first and most absolute responsibility and, since this predeeds eternally any conscious decision, it simply is. It is the body of matter itself.