The Strangeness of alterity

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Emanuelis Levinas (Emmanuel Levinas); Keistumas; Strangeness.

ENThe problem of strangeness can be approached from different angles: aesthetic, sociological, psychological, cultural, etc. Strangeness can be found as well in the strangeness of experience: I as stranger to myself, or the strange place I find myself, or the strange people who surround me. These would enable us to uncover the uncanny (Freud, Heidegger), or discuss sociological notions of alienation (Marx) or the aesthetic method of ostranienie (Shklovsky, Brecht), just to mention a few additional accounts of strangeness. The goal of the present essay, however, is not to show various forms and aspects of strangeness, horizontally, as it were, but to address the very meaning of strangeness, intensively or vertically. Even more specifically, the present essay discusses the strange as at once that which comes from the outside and as that which addresses me. In the first part, I present a general notion of strangeness, mainly concentrating on strangeness as what is peculiar or weird. Some studies by Bernhard Waldenfels will be considered here. In the second part, the problem of strangeness is examined in the context of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, primarily in terms of his notion of personal otherness and the question of the link between strangeness and such [End Page 95] alterity. For the latter point of view, juxtaposing the difference and relatedness of strangeness and Levinasian alterity, we ask the question of if and of how alterity is strange. [Publisher annotation]

• The Place and face of the stranger in Levinas / Jolanta Saldukaitytė. Religions (Basel). 2019, vol. 10, iss. 2, 1 pdf (12 p.).
• The Roads of the others: E. Levinas and T. Adorno / Gintautas Mažeikis. Problemos. 2022, Priedas, p. 69-84.