ABSTRACT
History is closely related to culture; thus both will be treated in the current chapter. The fi rst section examines whether Levinas’s concept of time can be related to a phenomenological notion of historicity such that Levinas can be said to provide an implicit concept of historicity (as nonlinear and discontinuous). Moving from history to culture, Levinas’s thoughts on the stranger will be examined in the second section. Despite Levinas’s insistence on considering the Other without his or her world, some affi nities between the same/Other relation and the home/alien relation will come to appear. In the last section, the Platonic concept of the stranger will be examined in its different aspects. Especially relevant for our question is the discussion of the cultural stranger in the Laws.
