What Other Are We Talking About?

Abstract

It is through misunderstanding or misjudgment that some people consider me a disciple or inheritor of Levinas's work. To be sure, there are some troubling similarities between our texts, notably in the use of words-similarities whose coherence I cannot always locate in Levinas's work as a whole, and which at times appear to me like grafts rather than natural outgrowths of his argumentation, of his language. This makes them barely intelligible to me, not for reasons of difficulty, I believe, but due to the temporal unfolding of his discourse. It is as though to an initial statement had later been added comments or clarifications or, indeed, corrections that are not easily integrated and would require moving to another stage of thought. This problem is perhaps particularly crucial in Time and the Other, a collection of lectures given in 1946 and 1947 and published by Fata Morgana in 1979. Although the preface asserts that this collection reproduces the stenographic record of the lectures and that the spoken ... style of this writing will surely be, for many, abrupt or awkward in certain turns of phrase (TO, 29 -30), I would point out that the preface also introduces the texts in terms rather different from those figuring in the body of the chapters, notably with regard to points that interest me and that I address in this essay. But I also find these rifts in the argument even within the volume, indeed within a single lecture. And I wonder what makes them possible, or justifies them philosophically. Be that as it may, I have approached the question of the other along an entirely different path. And although our culture would certainly have benefited from a dialogue between our two perspectives, masculine and feminine, it stands only to lose from their assimilation. The real of the other as other would again be annulled, submerged in a single discourse-a discourse that remains egocentric and monological