ABSTRACT
PERSECUTION The ‘for’ of the for-itself, the pour-soi, turns into, veers (vire) towards the ‘for’ of the for-the-other, pour l’autre. I approach the other. But my approach to the other is approach in the separateness or sanctity of proximity in ethical space, space that exspatiates the already non-geometrical space of being-in-the-world whose topography is described in the third chapter of the first division of Being and Time.And there is a further twist. This turn, precisely because it is the turn of ethics, of my approach to the other in responsibility, is the way of the other’s approach to me.The trope of the for-myself turned into for-the-other turns into a by-the-other or through-the-other, the pour veers into a par.And this is another trope of Heidegger’s trope of the ontic metaphor into the ontological quasimetaphor. It is a going over of Heidegger’s reflection in the ‘Letter on Humanism’: ‘Thinking is I’engagement par l’Etre pour l’Etre. I do not know if it is linguistically possible to say both of these (par and pour) at once, in this way: penser, c’est l’ engagement de L’Etre'1 If the ‘of of the engagement of being is both subjective and objective, speculative or, as one might also say, middle voiced, it might express conjointly the for and the by. Levinas’s response to this, one might say, is that the care or concern of being thus construed is a derivation from my still middle voiced being both responsible for the other and suffering by or through or from the other.‘The for-the-other (or sense) goes as far as the from-the-other, as far as suffering from a splinter that burns the flesh, but for nothing.Only thus is the for-the-other-passivity more passive than all passivity, emphasis of sense-saved from the for-oneself’ (AE 64-5, OB 50).
