Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from October, 2017

Hospitality: being a host, being hostage

Levinas' analysis of the face in T&I drafts several elements for deconstruction. It is in a great extent about the voice, about seeing language in its formal element as structurally dialogical and its prime function as that of enabling discourse aimed towards a public - and not description or coping with the world. The structure of language - and indeed of voice - makes explicit the asymmetry between the other, as a master, and the speaker. As a speaker, I'm in the hands of the other because language is a public device formally structured by diaphonia, by different discourses and that difference is embedded in the very structure of thematizing anything, in the very structure of the conceptual. As a consequence, it is not that I have a grip on my concepts and not even that they have a grip on me but rather that the others have a grip on me through my conceptual life. Concepts make me think, but they do so only because they make my masters present. Without a public language,