Abstract: This paper presents the philosophical questioning of intersubjectivity in the phenomenological theories of Husserl, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty, considering their contribution to the constitution of psychological studies of alterity. It presents forms in which the other appears before me, its possible presence as a constitutive element of the world in which I take part, and above all, as a constitutive element of myself. In order to recognize the other in its radical alterity I cannot institute it by comparison with myself, by analogy or introjection and not even by processes of affective fusion. These forms exclude the possibility of recognizing the other in its difference. It is suggested that we have to start with a sensible/perceptive experience in the proper sphere of a lived body, so as to make it possible to recognize the other as difference in its expressive forms. As a conclusion, a favorable substitution of the notion of intersubjectivity by the one of intercorporeality is proposed.

Abstract: The attempt to understand alterity, or the relationship with “others,” is a topic of great urgency on the contemporary international scene. Xenophobia and racism, ethnic wars, prejudice and stigmas, segregation and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, age, and social class are widespread phenomena involving high levels of violence. These phenomena are expressions of the failure to recognize others as full human beings with the same rights as we have. They are also situations in which difference provokes intolerance, hatred, and the urge to annihilate the other. Rather than concentrating on discrimination, violence, and hatred, this article centers on concern for, solidarity with, and responsibility toward the other. It addresses several related questions: How is the scope of the “I” and the “we” defined? How is the line between “self” and “other(s)” drawn? How should that relationship be established in the field of the rights and duties of citizenship, especially with regard to the “right to difference” and “cultural citizenship”? What is the role of the state and of civic institutions? To approach these questions, I take the micro situation of interpersonal interaction as a point of departure and then move on to the macro level of intergroup relations. It is at the macro level that citizenship, in its dual sense of assertion of rights and civic commitment to the community, incorporates the concern with both the recognition of the rights of others and the legitimacy and legality embodied in the state.

Abstract: Considered to be one of the most influential auteurs in French cinema today, Chantal Akerman has had a profound impact on both feminist filmmaking discourse and avant-garde film. She has shown herself to be an uncompromising and dedicated practitioner of the cinematic arts in works such as "I...You...He...She" ("Je tu il elle", 1974); "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975); "Meetings with Anna" ("Les Rendez-vous d'Anna", 1978); "American Stories/Food, Family, and Philosophy" ("Histoires d'Amerique", 1989); and "From the East" ("D'Est", 1993). Akerman has continued to create new and unexpected films that explore ideas about image, gaze, space, performance, and narration.This collection of essays edited by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster assesses Akerman's wide-ranging oeuvre, particularly her exploration of identity and memory, and considers her development as an artist and as a social force. Along with a detailed filmography and bibliography, both compiled by Foster, ten of the key figures in contemporary feminist moving-image discourse explore the themes with which Akerman is preoccupied: sexuality and lesbian identity, subjectivity, alterity, quotidian reality, the mother-daughter relationship, and Jewish diasporic identity.

Abstract: This essay seeks to engage with the idea of the possibility of meaningful ethical encounters with another. It does not attempt to engage with the broader discourse of ethics. Its purpose is simply to read a few of Gayatri Spivak’s discussions about ethics and alterity and offer a reading of three postcolonial texts in the context of that reading.

Abstract: Though Levinas and the classical American pragmatists 1 operate within diverse historical contexts, there are remarkable convergences as well as crucial differences in their respective reconstructions of the tradi- tional concepts of freedom, selfhood, and the moral, and their ground- ing of these in what each calls a sociality of time. This essay will engage in a comparative exploration of these reconstructions to clarify the depth of the issues involved and provide a focal point for weighing the mer- its of their respective positions, not only in these areas but for a host of other areas of shared concern that extend beyond the scope of this paper. Levinas' understanding of time plays a vital role throughout his phi- losophy, and this role is rooted in his understanding of the discontinu- ity of time as the basis for the radical alterity of self and other and the radical novelty that he seeks. While his understanding of time and the alterity with which it is inextricably tied evolves in a more extreme way as his thought progresses, this progression always exhibits his belief in the discontinuity of time and its essential role in alterity. Levinas credits Bergson for liberating philosophy from the model of scientific time or clock time. 2 The importance of Bergson's work for Levinas' understanding of time is encapsulated in the latter's assertion that "(t)he first contemporary influence on my own thinking was Bergson. . . . Moreover, Bergson's theory of time as concrete duration (la duree concrete) is, I believe, one of the most significant, if largely ignored, contributions to contemporary philosophy." 3 Both the con- creteness of duration and the duration of concreteness provided a last- ing influence on Levinas' thought. This influence is evident in Levinas' rejection of the abstract formal time line, which, he holds, has instants inserted with it, each of which

Abstract: Monique David-Ménard teaches philosophy at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and is directeur de recherches at the University of Paris VII – Denis Diderot (École Doctorale: Recherches en Psychanalyse); she is also vice-president of the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne. DavidMénard’s dual training as philosopher and psychoanalyst underlies many of the distinctive features of her work. Her books explore the complex relationships at work between philosophy and desire, between abstraction and the body, between logic and fantasy. Though she received a classical training in philosophy and epistemology, she has always approached the subject from an unorthodox perspective, one “derived from listening to the unconscious,” and it has been clear from the beginning that her work was never going to fit easily with “the philosophy of the philosophers [...]. I work on all the things that go wrong in the relation between reason and the real.” She recognises that there is always “something external to pure conceptuality that constantly underpins the conceptual work” of philosophy and that it seeks to conceal or repress – “without the struggle against fantasy,” for example, “there would be no conceptual thought” as such. She does not see the detection of such repressed “impurities” at the heart of philosophical abstraction in primarily destructive or critical terms: the analysis of such repression instead provides a way of tapping into philosophy’s tense but creative negations, into its constitutive conflicts and exclusions. David-Ménard’s first book, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis (1983) was motivated by an interest in the way that “the field of the unconscious is resistant to the methodology of the history of science,” by the effort to “try out the methods of the history of science in a domain where it looked as though they might not work.” The book reviews the way in which major psychoanalytic theories of hysteria conceive of the erogenous body, and deals in particular with the example of Freud’s conception of conversion hysteria (i.e. the way mental disturbances or illnesses acquire bodily expression). Meanwhile, inspired by Lacan’s example, David-Ménard began to re-read the major texts of classical philosophy (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege) in such a way as to underscore philosophy’s agitated negotiations with its Other, with what lies at the limits of philosophy, with monique david-ménard

Abstract: The ethical value specific to literature lies in the particular mode of inventiveness it exhibits. Invention occurs as the advent of alterity in the cultural field, alterity being that which is, at a given historical moment, outside the framework provided by the culture for thinking, imagining, feeling, perceiving. An invention is also always singular, in the sense that it is a configuration of cultural materials unlike any other. In order for a singular alterity to enter the cultural field, that field has to change, and possibilities for further inventiveness emerge. An ethically responsible reading is itself an inventive event, a performance of the work that does justice to its inventiveness, singularity, and alterity, bridging the historical and cultural distance between writing and reading.

Abstract: Preface and Acknowledgements Prelude Self-Identity and Life-History I. Self-Identity as Narrated Life-Story II. Dispossessed Sense in Life-History Chapter One: Experiential Sense in Life-History I. The Sense of Experience II. Experience and Expression Chapter Two: The Temporality of Experience in Life-History I. Temporal Modification and Primal Impression II. The Temporality of a Radical Turn in Life-History Chapter Three: Self-Identity and the Experience of Alterity I. Narrative Identity and Alterity II. intersubjectivity and Wild Alterity III. The Experience of Alien Alterity Chapter Four: Elements for an Ethic of Alterity I. Moral Law and Wild Responsibility II. Moral Autonomy and Narrative Identity III. The Philosophical Discovery of Desire IV. Guilt as a Refusal of Response

Abstract: The central concepts in ethical discourse are held to be responsibility (regarding ourselves and others), justice, and mercy (or charity), whereas in the discourse of aesthetics a similarly important position is attributed to the concepts of perception (or sensibility), experience (of the particularity and alterity of the phenomenal), and art (in terms of objects, processes or events that motivate this kind of experience). What makes for a persistent difference or even sometimes an incommensurability of the ethical and aesthetic stance is the claim to absolute autonomy and unrestricted validity that is made by both. In some postmodern versions of ethical discourse we can observe an approximation to aesthetics that can side-step the area of possible conflict. What is more important, however, is that both in the Levinas type of ethics and in postmodern aesthetics the focus is on alterity ; moreover, the aesthetic stance, in its emphasis on the specificity of the particular and on the imagination as the faculty of the possible, may well be indispensable for any ‘right’ way to act.