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Discourse as the Condition of Possibility for Dialogue I. THE zyxwvu RELATION OF zyxwvu DISCOURSE zyxw I.1. Discourse as an Ethical Relation IF THE SEPARATION or “transcendence” of the other from the same is produced as an ethical refusal-coming from the other-of being reduced to the categories of knowing operated by the same, as the prohibition “Thou shalt not kill” in the very expression of the other, then this prohibition also produces, as the inverse side of this transcendence, a relation with the other. For to be called into question (as the assimilative march of the same) is already to be in relation with the other, to find oneself (however more or less consciously) in a relationwith the otherby means of this calling into question itself, a relation that calls the same to account, that calls the same to responsibility with respect to the other-which is to find oneself (over and above any ontological relation, or better, as we shall see, before and as constitutive of any ontological relation) in anethical relation. And insofar as this relation is produced, as we have seen, in the expression of the other, in his “speaking” (even if nonverbally, by means of the face that, even without words-that is, not as a phenomenal face in theworld but as a “facing” thatcalls the world into question- “speaks”) that calls the same to responsibility, Levinas refers to this relation as “discourse.” “The face speaks. The manifestation of the faceis already discourse” (TI 66 zyxwv [37] zyxwv ).In the encounter of the face,we are already in the realmof language. This relation must be ethical insofar as it is produced (as we argued via negativa in the previous chapter) precisely as a refusal of any ontological participation, as a refusal of any a priori ontological relation. It is produced as ethical, rather, insofar as the 110 zyxwvuts THE IDEA OF DISCOURSE other’s expression comes from on high, that is, from an ethical height, across whatLevinas refers to as “the primary curvature of being” (TI 86 [59]). Such curvature, such “height,” testifies to my inability toreducethisrelationto an ontological one, to a “horizontal” relation from being to being (or to a play within the same (being)), to a relation that would be able to be viewed (and thus regulated) from the outside, from the position of a neutral observer outside of the terms in relation’-the position to which (starting out from the position of a term fromwithin the relation) thetradition always aspires, and whichinevitablyresults,as we have argued following Levinas, in a reduction of the other to the same, or,which is to say the same thing, intotality. That is, if this relation is to be produced zyxw as zyxwvu ethical, it must be produced as an asymmetrical relation, must be produced as my ethical responsibility for the other,as my unilateral responsibility for the other. The same is, under this regime, “me” in particular, and not “me” as an instantiation of any “me in general,”2 for if it were the latter the other would not be genuinely other, but another “me,”my alter-ego, his zyxwv crltmhy articulated on thebasis of a shared egoity, which would be to redke the otherin advance to the same.3 For to demand that the other be correlatively responsible for me is to attempt once again to pretend to a position outside of the relation fromwhich it could be viewed and regulated, to pronounce upon the terms in relationas if from the outside as a term inside the relation: to be at once one of the plaintiffs and the judgein a suit. But if the ethical separation/relation is, as we are claiming,precisely a callingintoquestion of thisability to judge (myself and) the other froma purported outside (but precisely as a being judged by an irreducible outside), the ethical relation with the otherimposes itself as an irremissibly asymmetrical one, where the irreducible difference that is implied in the call to ethical responsibility is maintained in the relationship that it evokes. In this relationship the same and the other remaindistinct and noninterchangeable: “We are the same and the other” (TI 39 [9]).There is here no possibility of an a priori common basis or point of appeal upon which the relationship would be founded insofar as the relationshipitself is a response to the lack of any such common measure. And as the relationship is what it is as a refusal of any common measure, theresponsibility...

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