Tag: ethics

The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communication. To be means to communicate. Absolute death (non-being) is the state of being unheard, unrecognized, unremembered…. To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Witness, then, is neither martyrdom nor the saying of a juridical truth, but the owning of one’s infinite responsibility for the other one (l’autrui). It is not to be mistaken for politicized confessionalism. The confessional is the mode of the subjective, and the representational that of the objective… In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation. When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us. Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence. Witness begets witness. The text we read becomes a living archive.

Carolyn Forché, “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art” (via ecrituria)

Julia Kristeva

Let us not seek to solidify, to turn the otherness of the foreigner into a thing. Let us merely touch it, brush by it, without giving it permanent structure. Simply sketching out its perpetual motion through some of its variegated aspects spread out before our eyes today, even some of its former, changing representations scattered throughout history. Let us also lighten that otherness by constantly coming back to it-but more and more swiftly. Let us escape its hatred, its burden, fleeing them not through leveling and forgetting, but through the harmonious repetition of the differences it implies and spreads.” 34

To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on another, putting the other at risk, causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other. In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt.

Judith Butler