LA CONSTRUCTION IDENTITAIRE POUR SOI ET POUR LES AUTRES IDENTITY BUILDING FOR SELF AND FOR OTHERS

Abstract

The notion of “otherness” in its full complexity seems particularly operative in colonial and postcolonial contexts. I refer especially to Emmanuel Levinas who, in his book “Alterity & transcendence” (2006), assured us that “an encounter takes place with strangers; otherwise it would be mere family ties.” What is indeed more promising than that crossing, or forcing the other’s countenance, which poses and imposes on us as the space of our freedom precisely because it is the representation of alterity? This promise of an encounter with the other, when it occurs, establishes a unique boundary of duality between the ‘I’ and ‘You’ as discursive categories (in the deictic sense of the discursive categories of Emile Benveniste or Saussure, or even in the sense of Rimbaud’s famous “Je est un autre”). This is precisely what lays the foundations of ethics, according to Levinas, and not so much the relation between I (as subject), and the id which, on the contrary, foreshadows the lifelessness and non-sense of “there is”. Thus, the question of ontology is not so much that of “What is being?” but “What is otherness?” Therefore, the other is somehow the cornerstone of ontology.