Reading Levinas and Spivak face to face reveals a cultural and historical complexity at the center of the language of absolute difference. Absolute difference, which locates absoluteness in a sense of difference without measure or contrast, commits parricide against the paternal line of the West, singling out, on our reading, the twin prerogatives of Parmenides and of the economy of light.

With Parmenides and light as the lead figures, the problem of difference could be easily read as another language for or dramatic staging of the now familiar critique of the metaphysics of presence. But both Levinas and Spivak understand the problem of difference in the space of encounter, where the unraveling or self-immolation of the concept happens at the point of contact. Embodiment in its fullest and most vulnerable sense: the exposure to the world and the materiality of the languages of address, response, and silence. This irreducible intentionality or relationality, mixed with a certain sheerness of materiality, means that the otherness of the Other is not just an epistemic event of fracture, but also a moment of concern with the ethical and justice.