The face of the other

Abstract

This paper is based on the broad assumption that aspects of location determine and inflect our ways of negotiating self-other relationships and therefore our discursive practices. Given recent happenings at both the local and the global level, I identify terror as one such component of location that encourages the perpetuation of a binary mode. Acts of terror are possible only when the perpetrator is ‘unable’ to see the victim, when he successfully renders the other invisible. And in a location directly affected by terrorist/insurgent incidents, the rhetoric that is employed to talk about ‘us’ and ‘them’, about the terrorist and the victim, is marked by an implicitly oppositional configuration of subject and object. In attempting to understand this persistent binarism through the terrorist's use of invisibility, and simultaneously reading Gandhi's particular version of equality, Levinas on the ethical relationship, and Irigaray on “two subjects”, I suggest that a redemptive alternative may emerge out of a review of binarism itself, through the adoption of the ‘otherness of the other’ perspective, where the other's ‘difference’ is privileged and welcomed, and not sought to be appropriated and erased.

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