What do my end-of-semester books tell me? I always ask.

I’ve been thinking for the past handful-plus years about how to translate Levinas’ work – which is so critically entrenched in the European experience – into the experience of the Americas – which is so critically disengaged from the European experience. This engagement/disengagement is hardly a firm limit. On the one hand, Levinas’ conception of the Other is so obviously indebted to the trajectory of European history, which he (not unproblematically) calls ‘the Bible and the Greeks.’ This debt is on display in his sense of critique (strategy) and exemplary historical cases (content). On the other hand, there is surely a case to be made for a general structure of transcendence to which we can attribute explanatory force, even if that force is, in the end, abut how such an explanation breaks apart.

Which gets me to this pile of books from my semester’s courses. Levinas and Derrida alongside Gutierrez, Dussel, Galeano, Marcos, and Mignolo. Eclectic grouping, sure, but the semester has been in so many ways just one long narrative about difference and its revolutionary instigation. What has happened to Levinas in this narrative? What has happened to this cluster of Latin Americans?

I remember reading Levinas in five Latin American spaces. In all five – La Habana, Lima, Ayacucho, La Paz, and Montevideo – his work said something really important about fractured lives, the ghosts of history, and the intractable character of responsibility. From the equivocation (orally, in performed speech) of dollars and pain (dolores/dolares) in Cuba to life after massacres and displacement in Perú to the never shortening shadow of colonialism, there is something in Latin America that calls for a translation of Levinas’ work. By “translation,” here, I of course do not mean a reader of his work in Spanish or French or Portuguese. Those exist. Rather, I mean a translation of those ideas born of pain, borne by pain, that give rise after the Shoah, in Levinas’ work, to an articulation of the interruption of history as theodicy. Ideas, thereafter, infusing justice-work with prophecy. Ideas thinking from what lies outside the gaze and power back into the denucleated center of that gaze and power. And so on.

The moment of translation lies in the terms of this agon of same and other. After all, the reversal of priority that begins Levinas’ long, half-century (!) meditation on responsibility and transcendence is only possible if we understand a certain positionality of the reversed terms. One can only imagine a reversal if one understands what needs to be reversed. And here the European experience is on display: Jew as Other, Christo-Pagan as Same. Thus Derrida’s questions to Levinas, through the rethinking of Joyce’s formulation: Jewgreek is Greekjew.

How does this Same-Other configuration work in a Latin American context? The space of sociality is already different. From the invasion that founds not only the ideas, but even just the words, “Latin” and “America” onward (see Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America), one cannot think Latin American social space outside a world system, whether that be phases and locales of colonialism, global capitalism, or neoliberalism. Those terms in themselves already pull Levinas away from his letter and into the spirit of his work, but more important for me is how alterity appears in these contexts. Namely, how the Other in the Other, and even further as the peripheral Other of that Other in the Other, starts to generate a sense of subalternity that cannot be contained by Levinas’ description of the stranger.

To wit, the stranger appears at my door and disturbs my place in the world. The subaltern is estranged from the stranger, so does not appear even at the stranger’s door, whose displacement lands him at my door. The relation of, say, the Andes to the cities in South America give spatial expression to this doubling (or more) of alterity.

And there is also the particular character of history’s ghosts, which announce themselves daily in a painful history lived still – in memorial sites and the absence of such sites, as well as the daily suffering inflicted by neoliberalism. How do notions of diachronic time, of saying-said, and so on both work and unwork themselves through such sites and histories? To what sorts of responsibilities are we called, especially in those spaces where “we” is so infused with politics and history? In other words, what is the subaltern to Levinas? What is a Levinasian alterity infused with this politics and this history?

Or, firstly, why Levinas? In the end, Levinas changes everything by putting what is most other about the Other in the first position. And his half-century meditation on what it means to think either from that displacement or in the ruins of what it leaves behind is matched by very few. When Gutierrez reads the Book of Job as a story about the center of the world, rather than a strange case of suffering, Levinas’ notions of time and responsibility become clearer, even transformed into a political imperative. Dussel’s engagement with Levinasian language in the context of world-systems theory means everything – introducing a diachrony into the very origins of Modernity – in what he calls the transmodern. The final remarks to The Open Veins of Latin America finds Galeano evoking a prophetic reading of history, which matches so provocatively with the Preface to Totality and Infinity, something doubled in Mignolo’s new book on the “idea” of Latin America. And then there is Marcos’ repudiation of the macropolitical in favor of the micropolitical works of resistance – where the sincerity of the Good Government Junta (nice term!) is already a revolution.

In the end, this is about liberation and the question of whether or not Levinas’ work allows us to catch sight of a liberatory practice or transformed social space. Levinas or Foucault, liberation or the impossibility thereof? I’ve always thought Levinas brought us to that jewel that adorns the earth – that goodness that remains in a saddened and destroyed world – which, if cultivated, liberates our world from violence. But I’m not so sure such thinking, such liberation, is possible in a European context alone, if at all. Europe just might be animated by a murderous form of life. If we take Levinas seriously, here in a global context, we shouldn’t be surprised that hope is located in the most other of otherness, the hither-side of not only the living-present, but also a system of world history and domination. That is, if we take Levinas seriously, we should not be surprised to find the hope of the world against violence in Latin America.