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P A R T IV Nihilation and the Ethics of Alterity [One who is after the truth] sets out to be a man of learning. . . . One who wants to give free play to his subjectivity sets out, perhaps, to be a writer. But what is a man to do who is after something that lies between? And yet such examples of lying ‘‘between’’ are provided by every moral maxim, for instance . . . thou shalt not kill. . . . It is neither a verity not a subjective statement. . . . In many respects we keep to it strictly; in other respects . . . precisely defined exceptions are admitted. But in . . . cases of a third kind, as . . . in the imagination, in our desires, in the drama, or in newspaper reports . . . we roam in a quite unregulated manner between abhorrence and allurement. Something that is neither a verity nor a subjective statement is sometimes called a requirement. . . . that has been firmly attached to the dogmas of religion and . . . the law, and has thus been given the character of a truth arrived at by a process of deduction. —Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities From the perspective of an ethics of the other, negation can be construed as nihilatory force exerted against another or others. In the context of individuals, another as other is seen as breaking into the self-containment of the subject, so that the presence of that other is experienced as proscribing violence against her/him. More radically , the ethical can be manifested as a willingness to substitute oneself for the other when she/he is in mortal danger. Recent accounts of altruism as biologically determined may be thought to undermine this view of self-negation. What is more, an ethics of alterity fails to account for the moral status of harms inflicted on oneself. The violence exerted against multiple others in acts of mass extermination requires new accounts of the global languages of technology and information , as well as of the ‘‘logics’’ that may ground extermination, so that the interpreter is compelled to plot a course between and among them. Illustration: Nineteenth-century gouache, Japan. Collection of the author. ...

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