ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Levinas's philosophy of the ethics of alterity of the other. It reviews Levinas's preoccupation with the life incarnate with his dedication to the face-to-face ethical encounter of human inter-subjectivity occurring within daily life. Where Lacan leads us to, and leaves us with, the gap of the loss of the unconscious other self, Levinas's ethics of alterity is orientated around the gap of proximity between the self and the other human subject. More than most in the post-discourses, Levinas's focus is on the ethical other of human identity and the potential transformative affectivity of an ethics of alterity, inspiring the imagining of a post-humanist human rights for a twenty first century world which has now moved beyond traditional humanism. Such an ontological understanding of human identity grounds the collective upon a symmetrical sociality of equal self-coinciding beings, which reduces the alterity of human existence and inter-subjective sociality to the circle of the same.
