Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation

Abstract

There is always the matter of a surplus that comes from an elsewhere and that can no more be assimilated by me, than it can domesticate itself in me. A teaching that may part ways with Heidegger's motif of our being able to learn only what we already understandwhen does learning take place? what do we already understand?the Conversation belongs, as ethical relation, to the effort of thinking the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger. None of this amounts to thinking an object. Avital Ronell, Dictations