‘By force of love … something should happen to God, and someone happen to him’: the other's other(s) in Derrida

Abstract

This essay seeks to re-elaborate Derrida's own account of the other's heterogeneity, notably in light of critiques of deconstruction's thinking of difference, alterity, and the unconditional. At stake here is the precise meaning of what may be termed wholly other; or, better still, the specific nature of the arguments about the question of the other from among Derrida's writings, which must be recalled amidst any appeal to absolute alterity, especially of the kind frequently found in Derrida commentary today. Beginning with the argument that deconstruction's discourse of the other opens onto the wholly other not simply as the ‘beyond’ or the ‘outside’ of phenomenology's limits, but only at the point where the phenomenological gives way in something like a double sense, the essay wants to speak of the mark and touch of the other, the ethics and politics of the other, indeed love of the other, in ways that disorganise and yet transform the very grammars of relationality.