Session 2: Inter-Subjective Bonds and Ethics

1st Global Conference

Tuesday 22nd September – Thursday 24th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

Infinite Responsibility for the Other in Emmanuel Levinas and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces
Joshua Getz
Ming Chuan University, Taiwan, R.O.C

For Levinas subjectivity begins in the self-in-relation to the ethical call of the Other individual. Accepting the call to be infinitely responsible for the Other inevitably engenders acts of love with no desire for reciprocity or recompense. The fundamental human condition is not one of mutuality, but of responsibility and dependence. By becoming the author of my existence, that is, by accepting my infinite responsibility to the Other, I realize my freedom to/in the Other. This moral philosophy coheres with the poignant theme of one person’s loving connection and obligation to another against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces.

The novel has two sections. The first focuses on Jakob Beer, who witnesses as a child in Poland the Nazis killing his family. Narrowly escaping being killed himself, he is found in the forest by Athos, a Greek archeologist who saves him from death. He cares for Jakob as a paternal figure and, at great personal risk, spirits him out to Greece.

Athos’s love absorbs Jakob’s trauma, grief and loss. Athos wants Jakob to redeem himself as a survivor by retaining the past, without becoming fossilized by it. Athos also instructs Jakob to remember his Hebrew and Yiddish, the languages that (in)formed him. As the boy is taught paleobotany, he learns the adoptive father’s ways of knowing and is initiated into the Lacanian Symbolic Order. Athos helps to redeem Jacob by giving him information, knowledge, affection, and security.

Athos’s teaching imbues Jakob with the decision to live, the resolution to have faith and love, and the choice to do good. Through encouraging Jakob to look within and without and gracefully record his observations, Athos saves Jakob, who becomes a poet and a translator and goes on living positively after Athos’s death.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Beyond the Page – Beauvoir and the Theory of Other Minds
Wendy O’Brien
University of Guelph-Humber / Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Canada

In an interview with Jessica Benjamin and Margret Simons (19), Simone de Beauvoir acknowledged that hers was “the problem of the other consciousness.” Dissatisfied with the prevalent readings of Hegel’s account of self and other offered up by Hyppolite (1947) and Kojeve (1947), accounts which maintained that individuals were trapped within a “battle to the death,” Beauvoir turned to literature as a model and a means for accounting for the lived experiences of mutual recognition (i.e. love and friendship). In the act of writing and of reading, one entered into the mind of the other not with the desire to manipulate or dominate, but, rather, to understand and equally important, to be understood. Indeed, how would one write or read if this were not the case? Why would one even venture to begin? Writing and reading seem premised on faith in literature as the site intersubjectivity (Beauvoir, 1964). But is this faith well founded?

This paper takes up this question. Beginning with an exploration of Beauvoir’s account of literature, it goes on to fill in the gaps in her account relying on recent studies in cognitive science. More specifically, reconciling Beauvoir’s insights and her own writings with the theory of other minds advanced by authors including Baron-Cohen (1995), Oatley (1999, 2006, 2008), and Zunshine (2006), it offers up an argument which sees the possibility for mutual recognition – for escaping self versus other relationships – in the novel. It goes on to consider whether what we learn through the stories found therein can transcend the page and be used as a model for encounters with the other in the world outside the covers of the book.

The Self and the Other, a Journey of Mutual Recognition
Graciela Susana Pérez-Boruszko
International Studies and Languages, Seaver College, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, United States

Departing from the premise that we all participate in a collective history while developing a personal history through a private story and my own personal intercultural journey as a compass, I explore the interrelation of the self with ‘the other’ in the journey of the shaping of a personal identity that will reveal a personal vocation. I grew up fascinated by the stories that I heard from natives whom we served as my parents related to my sister and me the traditional stories as well as the biblical stories that became very familiar. This fascination developed into an intellectual curiosity shaped by the presence of the other prompting a dialogue that soon turned into a conversation, which convey stories that encapsulated lives. The practice of hospitality, of making room for the other was deeply ingrained in our ‘migratory’ journey while serving many different ethnic groups. Our disposition to serve offers a reverse side of the contemporary migratory currents that live the globalization from a personal profitable search. My personal journey shaped a sense of self in the rapidly changing contexts that we move in quite frequently. This experience is associated with the interrelations in academia, and as we interact with students who are also in a quest of their particular vocations, and as we live the interactions within academia. Between the exclusion of different ideas, the tolerance of others, the fact of ignoring some or engaging in a senseless reconciliatory quest of ideas, there is a middle ground of mutual respect-of making room for the other with its own ideas and beliefs, of standing still and being comfortable while we disagree. In the practical arena, how flexible can hospitality become in the negotiation of personal and private space and making room for the other, which is getting closer and closer to the self?