Toward an Alternative Ethical Vocabulary

Contemporary ethical theory needs to speak to globalisation and coloniality. Globalisation has generated social relations in which lifestyles and values are somewhat shared. Across the world, from the beginning of European colonial rule to the present, a combination of legal, economic, educational, as well as military and police forces have imposed, promoted and maintained some forms of life, such as the heterosexual, patriarchal family, at the expense of alternative ways of life. A key question for decolonial ethics is how to relate to others in a way that affirms cultural rights in response to these standardising impositions. In this chapter, I argue that Édouard Glissant's framing of an ethical relation as emerging from ‘contacts’ with others, defending the ‘opacity’ of others and ultimately standing in solidarity with others, is more fruitful for decolonial pursuits than Emmanuel Levinas's framing of an ‘encounter’ with a single Other, whose difference is understood in terms of ‘alterity’, and who is ultimately served through reverence. I start from Levinas because the philosophy of liberation, decolonial ethics and decolonial political theology continue to use his vocabulary: difference is framed in terms of alterity, and the ethical relation is exemplified in bearing witness. Calling into question Levinas's ethical vocabulary also shows the limitations of contemporary ethical theory that relies on his terms.

Levinas's concept for difference is ‘alterity’, ‘the radical heterogeneity of the other’ such that this other is ‘absolutely other’. He reserves the term ‘religion’ for the face-to-face ‘ethical relation’, ‘a relation without relation’ in which ‘the encounter with the Other opens the infinite’. He asserts: ‘The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us.’ The Other is a rupture, breaking the possibility for a shared world of relation and communication. The language Levinas uses to describe the ethical relation is not compassion or care, but extreme and hyperbolic terms such as obsession, persecution, trauma and substitution. He insists further that the Other is not different with only ‘a relative alterity’ and in doing so avoids considerations of cultural difference.