Ethics and Optics

Abstract

The world map traditionally represents the Northern hemisphere at the top and the Southern hemisphere at the bottom, but in that representation is something more than arbitrary: a geography of signification. In the area where the geo-signification is below, the intellectual work, specifically the work of knowledge, immediately faces the unfinished process of an historical heritage of painful human and ecological destitution. Here, think is enact the archeology of the verb to think: dress a wound, minister a patch.' The generous Heideggerian es gibt, the trusting ontology of Being's donation, contradicts itself in deficiencies and in the blurred sight of Being. At the same time this geo-signification of a below builds resistance within a fragmented identity the use of other sources, different recourses, even though this is a modest identity questioning traditions and cultures. This is the reason why Latin America is not just geography, but a disquieting puzzle that makes one think. Here in the last decades of this century, the Levinasian categories of totality, alterity, and subjectivity are functioning as signifiers those wishing think Latin America, its contradictions and its revelations. For me, the almost convulsive movement from a predominantly Heideggerian a Levinasian perspective opened the possibility of giving expression both a muted reality, and a human and spiritual experience heretofore hidden. It allowed me, as a Christian theologian, a surprising proximity the biblical text and a reinterpretation of systematic treatises. Although the acceptance and rigor of Levinasian categories of and alterity remain slow and controversial, we work today, in Southern Brazil, as a group of translators and commentators of Levinas determined think our economic, political, spiritual, and ecological context. Levinas' thought has allowed us discuss ecology in terms of alterities.2 Among these thinkers are Enrique Dussel, Marcelo Fabri, and Marcelo Pelizzoli, who have contributed significantly the appropriation of Levinas' thought in the Latin American context.3 Emmanuel Levinas is not a lonely genius in Western thought; like others, Levinas has precedents, such as Franz Rosenzweig, and a philosophical context: phenomenology and the experience with his teacher, Husserl.' But Levinas' thought has sparked much interest in both Europe and Latin America. He seemed have the vocation of the Evil Genius, the Cartesian malin genie: one who disturbed the discourse of Western-Greek tradition, corroded its most obvious certainties, tarnished and paralyzed thought. Levinas probed Western discourse with the resolution of a surgeon whose scalpel runs deeper and deeper into the depths of discourse and reality, Truth and subjectivity. What Levinas exhumed was the pain of loss, the seriousness of responsibility, and the ecstasy of freedom. What Levinas sought was a philosophy that would inaugurate a truer world, one that is better conceived, better cared for. In the contradictory crossroads of the West, and its often troubled condition in the twentieth century that is living out the celebration of totality at the time of globalization, (for its joy and pain the arch of totalization), the title evil genius would be more appropriately applied Nietzsche or even Kierkegaard than Levinas. But it is in this same twentieth century that the masters of suspicion multiply in the Western tradition, with their philosophical, scientific, religious and artistic discourses. The malaise of Western culture has a few precise landmarks. Levinas was dramatically involved in one of them, World War II (1939-1945). This poignant experience which was a central concern for Levinas as a Jew, is clearly expressed in the preface of one of his most remarkable works, Totality, and Infinit: Does not lucidity, the mind's openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? …