Book contents
4 - Ethics of Entanglement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
It is a question of a nothingness distinct from the nothingness of anxiety: the nothingness of the future buried in the secrecy of the less than nothing.
Levinas, Totality and InfinityWith the subaltern and the theory of hybridity, we begin to bring the problem of incarnate historiography into clearer view. In particular, we see how the historical experience of colonialism challenges the meaning of difference by moving both the sense of loss and the reconfiguration of relation away from the margins and toward the center of what it means to speak (or resist speech) and to conceive place. In that movement, knowing and being are shifted away from languages of totality and sameness, and thereby begin to engage with the complex enigmas of radical difference. In that sense, the problems of race, nation, and other, framed by incarnate historiography, cannot be seen as matters of autobiographical report or accidental qualities of human experience. Rather, race and nation alter the space or geography of epistemology and ontology; the Other makes knowing possible and impossible, and breaks up the coherence of being in specificity and in general. To the extent that Levinas's work is concerned with radically overturned notions of knowing and being – finding self-awareness and self-presence after the creative work of the Other – the postcolonial revision of the terms of difference is an immanent critical intervention. Levinasian thinking must revise itself after the revision of its most intimate conceptual terms.
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- Levinas and the PostcolonialRace Nation Other, pp. 129 - 164Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011