Book contents
2 - Epistemological Fracture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
[T]he relationship with the other involves more than relationships with mystery.
Levinas, Time and the OtherIt is the subaltern, the fisher and the grass-roots peasant, who produces a constant interruption for the full telos of Reason and capitalism, for those who have the patience to learn.
Spivak, ‘Responsibility’As we have seen, incarnate historiography names at one and the same time the intimacy of the ethical and what extends the ethical beyond the initial borders of encounter. Incarnation bears the history of the encounter with the singular Other, but also bears the traces of a long history of violence, pain, and grievance. This insight, generated from the horizon of Levinas's own thinking, requires a cluster of important modifications to the letter of his thought. The intimacy or closed infinity of for-the-Other subjectivity becomes, in a moment of historical stretch, obligated beyond Levinas's own articulation of the ethical. This is the consequence of taking the body seriously; we are obligated in our bodies, in our skin, by an Other who speaks embodied, even as the language of responsibility sends us into an elsewhere of time and relation. Embodiment reminds us of the historical and political context of not just knowing and being, but the encounters with obligation that explode any attempt to think obligation as a matter of principle, habit, or duty. What does it mean to be a body, to be embodied?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Levinas and the PostcolonialRace Nation Other, pp. 50 - 88Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011