philoSOPHIA

In her essay "Choosing the Margin," bell hooks draws attention to the way uncritical celebrations of difference and otherness often act as an alibi for progressive politics. hooks writes:

I am waiting for them to stop talking about the "Other," to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about difference. It is not just important what we speak about, but how and why we speak. Often this speech about the "other" is also a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences, that space where our words would be if we were speaking, if there were silence, if we were there. This "we" is that "us" in the margins, that "we" who inhabit marginal space that is not a site of domination but a place of resistance. Enter that space.

(hooks 1990, 151)

The recent proliferation of discourses on alterity, particularly with the growth of Levinas studies, makes hooks's critique all the more relevant for ethical and political theory today. To what extent has this emphasis on alterity affected the dynamics of philosophical and political life? Does it fall into the trap that hooks identifies here as a mask with which privileged subjects present themselves as critical thinkers, while failing to listen to the diverse voices of concrete others gathered under the rubric of "the Other"? It is one thing to affirm one's infinite responsibility for the Other, and quite another thing to make good on that responsibility in specific contexts, especially in a political landscape where [End Page 195] some faces are more visible than others, and some voices more likely to be heard. Unless we can flesh out Levinas's ethical project with a political project of resisting oppression, his ethics risks a level of abstraction that covers over its own blind spots. And unless we can distinguish rigorously between otherness as a sign of political exclusion and otherness as a source of ethical command, we risk repeating the conflation of certain others with a position of weakness and victimhood, where "we" can feel responsible for "them" without having to listen to anyone but ourselves.

Hooks's critique of the empty invocation of difference and otherness is crucial; and yet, emancipatory politics cannot do without some working concept of difference and otherness. Indeed, I think we need two distinct concepts: a difference that refers to the multiplicity of relational, historically specific modes of differentiation, and an alterity that refers to the singular, nonrelational otherness of one who remains irreducible to anything or anyone else. In what follows, I develop these two concepts in response to hooks's critique, as a way of heeding her imperative to "enter that space" of critical marginality which fosters resistance and the growth of political solidarity. I begin with hooks's analysis of the use and abuse of concepts such as difference and otherness, teasing out a sense of difference as social positionality. Then, through a reading of Levinas, I develop an account of alterity as ethical singularity and the provocation of critical questioning. Throughout my analysis, I draw on the work of other ethical and political theorists to help distinguish between helpful and pernicious concepts of difference and otherness. My ultimate aim is to develop a workable theoretical language for something that already exists in practice in coalition-based political movements, but risks being undermined by the clunky language of identity politics: namely, a politics of difference rooted in an ethics of alterity.