ABSTRACT
The lanterns of reason have not been able to illuminate the other with the light of sameness that makes of their faces a mask. Behind these masks, behind those personae, the per-sound of the other filtrates, not the other of me, but the other other who sings in the silenced choir through the thundering pipe organs of sameness: “You will not kill me, you will not confine me within your own radius of sameness. Do not kill me: do not make of me a representation.” He who chants that song is a Lithuanian Jew born between two years and two worlds, between BC and AD, in the between of two periods according to the temporal totalitarianism imposed by the cult of Julius Caesar and Gregory XIII, which is, at the same time, the fine line that demarcates religious orthodoxy from the globalisation of all time. It is this Jew who realises that the otherness continues to be unthought of, despite the fact that his contemporaries feel it has already found its place in the thought of the différance. But it remains on the outside of that thought of the difference—which does not stop it from producing glimmers of a sameness that demarcates a frontier that excludes an outside, that is, the existence of an alterity inasmuch as sameness excludes, and, therefore, sameness continues to be the measuring rod of what is different, an other other, unthought of, whose countenance beckons me.
