Rethinking the Relationship of Ethics and Interculturality: A Dialogue with Levinas and Butler

Abstract

This paper aims to open the conceptualizations of difference, the other and the self as the key terms in the epistemology of interculturality into questioning in a dialogue with the ethical frameworks of Levinas and Butler. In this sense, the paper attempts to contribute to reformulating the idea of self and other within the scholarship of interculturality. Objecting to the Kantian ethics based on the reason and consciousness of the self with reference to its relation to the other, the paper adopts Levinas’s notion of ‘absolute otherness’ which proposes encountering the Other in his unique and absolute difference beyond the consciousness of the self and without reducing it to the sameness of the self. The possibility of an ethical obligation on a global scale is also argued in the paper with particular reference to Butler’s concepts of precariousness and vulnerability. Drawing on the idea of ethical obligation based on affect by Butler who built on the notion of otherness in Levinasian ethics, the paper endeavors to add a layer of affect to the discussion of ethics and interculturality in the proposed ethical framework.

Keywords

• Interculturality
• Ethical Obligation
• Levinas
• Butler

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