The New Barbarism and the Modern West by Koivukoski Toivo;

Author:Koivukoski, Toivo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

This pattern of the self-division of spirit promising mediation between self and other is what allows the transition of an “indifferent diversity” into a presence of otherness that is meaningful because it has become part of an identity. This occurs not through the mixing of a supposedly pre-established, original identity with some newcomer element, precisely because all identities are mediated, there being no “original and primal unity as such.”[45] The mediation of difference occurs rather through acts of recognition, where a kind of identity is formed within which the elements that are reciprocally identified maintain their distinctiveness.

One witnesses this pattern quite literally when one recognizes another as a free being, not as being other as such but as a being that could become other than what it is, thus bearing out the regenerative capacity to change themselves. This kind of recognition would entail a deeper respect than the treatment of people as one would like to be treated oneself, because it would hinge upon an active expression of freedom, a gesture of unconditioned response, a dialectical opening operating beyond the logics of reciprocal stimulus and response.

At its most elemental and personal level, this is the kind of act expressed by looking another in the eyes. Recognition at the ontological level of persons begins with this opening gesture; indeed, in the absence of this confirmation of person to person relations, otherwise entranced by the movement of limbs and the portioning out of bodies in spatial relations, regardless of whatever niceties are exchanged in the tit for tat of conversation, it is easy to feel as if no real identification with another has occurred, however many stories of the day are traded back and forth.

For there is always something beyond reciprocation in an act of the recognition of recognition, in the I see you seeing me that unites persons as autonomous subjects in free relations with one another. Such a feeling of communion is possible because of that kernel core of being in relation to difference, where the subject marks the indeterminacy of an emptiness that can be filled in this way or that. In this sense, it is not the predication of certain qualities onto the subject that defines a person in their essential uniqueness but the absence of such objective qualities at the core of differentiation, with the source of difference consisting of a self that can become other than itself. This is what one recognizes in looking another in the eye, wherein an identification with the other is formed on the basis of their being different also.

Here one sees through to the other in the blackness of the iris, that portal into the psyche that subsists within a circle of predications, starting with the color of the eye and leading outward to all the conditional environs of the self. At the core of these of concentric circles with their layers of attributed objectivities is that question of what the other may be thinking, of what they may say or do.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.