In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

14 Neither Close nor Strange Levinas, Hospitality, and Genocide W I L L I A M H . S M I T H At the outset of Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas defines the Other (l’Autrui)—the overarching theme of all his work—in terms of the stranger. He writes: The absolutely other is the Other. He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say ‘‘you’’ or ‘‘we’’ is not a plural of the ‘‘I.’’ I, you—these are not individuals of a common concept. Neither possession nor the unity of number nor the unity of concepts link me to the Stranger, the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself. But Stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power.1 For Levinas, then, we might say that to encounter the Other is to encounter the stranger, and that this encounter with the strange is essential to all interhuman contact: the stranger is the absolutely other, one that I do not have at my disposal, a being that is not wholly ‘‘in my site’’ or under my control.2 To encounter the stranger is to encounter another source of freedom, another source of world-constitution or world-disclosure, to put it in Husserlian or Heideggerian terms respectively. Of course, what is distinctive about Levinas’s phenomenological account of the Other is his claim that our relationship with the stranger is not exhausted by epistemological or ontological investigations; rather, for Levinas, our relation to the stranger—and therefore the nature of intersubjectivity itself—is fundamentally ethical. 242 Indeed, for Levinas, to encounter face of the stranger is to be called to ethical responsibility: ‘‘We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics.’’3 To encounter the stranger is to encounter an ethical demand, to discover in the face of another human being the demand that I account for myself and my actions. This defining feature of all intersubjective relationships— the ethical relation as a mode of critique—constantly puts me in the position of being both responsible to and for the stranger that faces me. In a long but important passage, Levinas describes this dual responsibility: The face with which the Other turns to me is not reabsorbed in a representation of the face. To hear his destitution which cries out for justice is not to represent an image to oneself, but is to posit oneself as responsible, both as more and as less than the being that presents itself in the face. Less, for the face summons me to my obligations and judges me. The being that presents himself in the face comes from a dimension of height, a dimension of transcendence whereby he can present himself as a stranger without opposing me as obstacle or enemy. More, for my position as I consists in being able to respond to this essential destitution of the Other, finding resource for myself. The Other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, the orphan, to whom I am obligated.4 In this way, for Levinas, when I encounter the face of the stranger I find myself in the position of being both less and more than the Other: I discover not only one who can command my allegiance, a superior, but also one who does so by calling out for aid as a dependent. The Other is simultaneously one to whom something is owed—who can judge me— and yet one who depends on my generosity to subsist. The stranger is a kind of being who is powerful by being powerless, one who ‘‘exceeds my powers infinitely, and therefore does not oppose them but paralyzes the very power of power.’’5 The expression of the Other—the face of the stranger—can command me, can call me to justice, not because of the Other’s worldly position of power, but because of the Other’s ethical resistance to power. As Levinas puts it, the relation between the I and the stranger is incommensurate with the exercise of power; it is not a relation with a very great resistance, but with something absolutely other.6 My aim in this essay, in addition to adumbrating Levinas’s phenomenology of the...

Share