ABSTRACT
Had a symposium on the Byzantine outsider been held in France, there is no doubt that the 'Other' would have dominated discussion. A symposium in Sussex on the Byzantine outsider promised more eclectic - if not less prejudiced - approaches. After all, we all know what an outsider is, don't we? Someone who doesn't quite fit in, not one of us, a bit of a rebel perhaps, a loner.1 We might have said forty years ago 'an Angry Voting Man', in celebration of Colin Wilson's instant best-seller, perhaps the true progenitor of the symposium. This book, The Outsider, a study of Barbusse, and Camus, Hesse and Dostoevsky, T.I. Lawrence, Van Gogh and Nijinsky, Blake and Kierkegaard,2 was deeply affected by the existentialist milieu out of which emerged Simone de Beauvoir, who in The Second Sex first introduced many academic feminists to the concept of alterity, to the idea of woman as not the subject of academic inquiry, but as the object, the Other.3 She did this with her famous accusation of sexism against Levinas's Time and the Other which - as his editor Hand says - 'appears to offer a male-oriented discourse', as he brings the Subject out into alterity to meet work, death, eros and fecundity.4 He was indebted to Husserl and Heidegger and ultimately to Freud; but
postmodern French feminists through Lacan have come to term£ with the concept, and indeed with Levinas.5 We may stiU be shocked when we come upon this sexist discourse, especially in its least explicit forms: the interpolated first sentence of the ODB entry on women, 'the Byzantine attitude towards women was ambivalent', appears again, almost verbatim, in Cavallo's anthology The Byzantines, placing in question the status of the exercise as a whole.6 Who are these Byzantines? we ask. Are these male Byzantines? Or did female Byzantines collude in their ascribed status, so marginalized as to be off the map? Or just the Byzantines who have left us a record? This is a major methodological problem of the symposium theme: how do we arrive at 'the Byzantines' for whom there is an 'Other'? (Anthropologists have recently become cautious about generalizing from a few subjects to a whole community,7 and this is an issue which goes to the heart of historical method as well.) But the Other for Levinas is not just the feminine (or the female), and its priority is at the basis of his philosophy: he is endlessly obligated to it and responsible for it8 For Edward Said, however, the Other involves detachment and exteriority: orientalists (in Said's sense) comment on the oriental with a certainty that these (orientalist and oriental) are watertight compartments: the orientalists make of themselves - or Said makes of them - outsiders.9 In a way, the intellectual or artist as outsider is not an unfamiliar concept, though it is one that Wilson abandoned in his book as too easy.10
