Abstract

For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, it is the presence of the other that obliges the human to speak. What makes the subject a subject is not only the other’s presence but the compulsion to speak, and that compulsion marks the subject as displaced, called into question. The other—the neighbor, the stranger—makes us responsible and marks the subject as always necessarily in relation, a relation that troubles the subject because while we are compelled to respond, that response inevitably fails to contain, to name, that relation. In Levinas’s formulation, the altogether other—the divine—presents us with the paradigmatic case in which the subject is compelled or called by that which exceeds our capacity to understand ..