The Ethics of Spanish Identity and In-difference

The Madrid bombing of 2004 and increased immigration have intensified the centuries-old repulsion of the Islamic other in Spain. This social shift is represented in Spanish narrative as a preoccupation with liminal identity—identity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neither. This essay examines Levinas's ethical philosophy of subjectivity in dialogue with Cristina Fernández Cubas's Parientes pobres del diablo (2006). In her texts, the confrontation between doubling and "in-difference," or the difference within, renders indifference impossible, for the double ensures the subject's ethical responsibility for himself and also for the other.