What an Other Other?

• Main Author: Miguel Gutiérrez
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2008-04-01
• Series: Ideas y Valores
• Subjects: Radical other; an-archy; infinite; Same; Other; totality.
• Online Access: http://www.ideasyvalores.unal.edu.co/archivos/PDF136/09_Miguel_Gutierrez.pdf

Lévinas is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century and is perhaps the philosopher who most seriously has taken the intent to think the difference, meeting the limits of language itself and the difficulties found in it for thinking the other, the difference, outside of the concept which closes the universe of sense in a totality. Lévinas centers his ethical ideas in the figure of the other and is extremely cautious, and maybe the (permanently open) totality of his work is no more than the intent to give that twirl to overcome the impossibility he faces, in affirming the place of that other not like the other of me, but the other as other. The outline of this essay pursues the comprehension of that radical other preserving its outside, its “beyond”, without enclosing it in the totalizing frontiers of the concept.