May 31, 2005

welcoming the other

In the light of mandatory detention and the way that Australia locks up, asylum seekers and refugees as the bearers of human rights, the insight of Emmanual Levinas makes sense: the core of the ethical relation is constituted by the welcoming of the other.

Leahy1.jpg
Sean Leahy,

I knew that Levinas breaks with Heidegger's phenomenology by understanding the ethical relation to the Other, the face-to-face, as exceeding the language of ontology. Ethics transgresses the liberal centering on the self-relation and its various forms, and centres on the relation with the other.

This is a return to the lived experience of a primordial "face-to-face" or person-to-person encounter, whilst the primacy of the ethical relation provides a more adequate description of human relations in a community.

The penny drops.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 31, 2005 11:50 PM | TrackBack
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