Waldenfels: "The Question of the Other"

The Question of the Other (Tang Chun-I Lecture Series)
By Bernhard Waldenfels


Drawn from a series of lectures that Bernhard Waldenfels delivered in honour of the Chinese philosopher Tang Chun-I, The Question of the Other is a collection of seven papers introducing what he calls a new sort of responsive phenomenology. This means that our experience does not start from our own intentions or from our common understanding, but from something that happens and appeals to us, disturbing our projects and forcing us to respond. We only become ourselves by responding to the Other. Hence otherness is not restricted to the otherness of the Other or to that of another order, it rather penetrates ourselves. We need a peculiar logic of response which includes items like singularity, inevitability, and asymmetry, and which transgresses the limits of common rules. This general perspective will be specified by dealing with crucial issues such as: the power of events which precede our own initiatives; a special kind of time-lag which separates what strikes us from our responding; the intertwining of selfhood and otherness within our bodily experience; and violence as an extreme form of refusing and violating the Other's demand. At last it will be shown how otherness penetrates the spatial structures of our life-world and how hospitality shapes our being in the world. Otherness means being never completely at home.

http://www.chineseupress.com/asp/c_Book_card.asp?BookID=2269&Lang=C


Preface
Lecture I: Experience of the Other
Lecture II: Response to the Other
Lecture III: The Power of Events
Lecture IV: Time-Lag
Lecture V: Bodily Experience between Selfhood and Otherness
Lecture VI: Violence as Violation
Lecture VII: Being Here and Elsewhere