Crisis, Otherness, Positionality: Thinking Beyond ‘Self and Other’ in Turbulent Times

Abstract

‘The new walls of Europe reflect crises in Europe’s relation to itself and the world’ (Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, preface to the 2017 edition). In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as elsewhere, populism has been on the rise, and far-right discourse has altered the political landscape. Should we respond with a re-thinking of community or is ‘community’ itself part of the problem? Can an ethics of alterity (which we find in Levinas) help re-define what we understand by community? As early as 1924, in Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, Helmuth Plessner warned that ‘too much’ community, far from being positive in an egalitarian sense, can foster aggressive identity-based ‘us-versus-them’ political sentiment. Plessner, in his major work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) develops his idea of ‘positionality’ and what we might describe as looking at human beings as ‘in-between’ creatures, bordering on other animals, connected to each other socially, culturally, politically, but also separate. Plessner is searching for a new way of looking at ‘borders’ — boundaries between connectedness and separation. Almost one hundred years after Plessner’s publications, I will argue that they still offer a valuable perspective on the theme of ‘border’ and one which may help counter the aggressiveness of contemporary western discourse on borders. In my contribution, I will also draw on thinkers from the phenomenological tradition ranging from Bernhard Waldenfels, who has written of the merits of what he calls the ‘Stachel’ of the other, to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity.