World of Philosophy

SR No.: 007005
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan
Publication Year: 2011
Total Pages: 1002
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 30 MB

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towards otherness. This ternary opens up possibilities of the interpretation of otherness based on cultural differences and a
constitution of objective nature on the basis of intersubjectivity. A phenomenology of (bodily) constitution alone fails to account for the constitution of the 'otherness' of the foreign (-other on the horizon of perception is another thing.) However, the fact that in order to comprehend a foreign subjectivity, it is necessary to formulate the idea of oneself. That is precisely flesh in its difference with respect to the body...myself as flesh, before the constitution of the alter ego-other, is what the strategy of the intersubjective constitution of nature obliges us to think. That we owe to this impossible enterprise the formation of the ontological concept of flesh is indeed the divine surprise.
The bodily location of suffering and indeed fertility are different for the sexes. How then does this locate the experiences of the other? The other in the horizon of one's bodily location provides a map for oneself via the negative of difference. The other must be seen as one's self. By negative difference, one finds oneself. In my work on empathy, in order to differentiate this concept from staid psychoanalytic concepts, the historical deconstruction returned me to the work of Edith Stein, the first student collaborator of Husserl who wrote a book, On The Problem of Empathy. Her work progressed from developing the notion of intersubjectivity to the notion of empathy, to women's issues as a writer and activist. Her subsequent conversion from Judaism to Christianity did not prevent her execution, due to her Jewish identity, during the war. Her works remained dislocated from the academic discourse of the university unlike that of Husserl or Scheller works' on sympathy and intersubjectivity. However the trajectory of Stein's work from intersubjectivity to empathy to her writings on gendered difference and spirituality leading to her experience of a numinous conversion and a life of the spirit as a nun, has perhaps a location in today's conception of thought, emotions and spirituality. In proposing the notion of a black mirror of history, as the unthought spaces of nonwestern feminist cultural history, I am inspired by Stein's contradictory positions during her lifetime. Is it that women's history provides a history of abjections and aporias? The experiences of the female other is removed from textual representation leaving a void. This black mirror, as an inversion of the Lacanian notion of vision and clarity, contains valuable unrecorded and unvalued testimony of women's experience and spirituality. Foucault casts light on the location of spirit and the emergent self within the time frames of history, a history of the other, white elite male privilege. In the case of third world women then the double injunction of the colonial gaze and patriarchy needs considering. Thus the Other forms the prototype of the self in the absence of a recorded history of self. The others' history is projected onto oneself. In reversing a reading of Ricouer one proceeds perceptually from oneself toward the-other-as-oneself, which could raise an interesting relocation of identities.
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