ABSTRACT
We are participants in a collective reality relative to our capacity for language-use. This reality is our social world, a web of discourse by which we are delineated, within which we are mutually recognisable, and for which we are responsible. Conventional philosophy would describe reality as a moral maze and identity mapped according to the corridor of our choosing. Yet the “grand narratives” or dominant discourses of our social world have a shared language. Whilst each offers a framework or modality of being as the clothes of (its) signification, these modalities are not independent. They are transitory narratives of a shared history, cultural evolutions in which we participate as agents of their development or decline. However, as I have argued throughout this book, it is within our socio-political environment that language operates as the site of ethics. For Levinas, before ontology we are called to witness the presence of an other in whose inimitable face is an alterity refractory to all categorisation. Our response to this call is made in language; by way of an ethical saying we establish our radical intersubjectivity, a subjection to and responsibility for the other. Indeed, this ethical relation breaks down the parameters of our identity-thinking, securing an accountability that exceeds and precedes the rights and obligations of the individual.
