Ethics of the Other and ethics of the Same: difference vs. similarity

Abstract

The article reconstructs the authentic foundations of a dialogue as the mutual penetration of real signifiers outside of symbolic signifiers by ridding the conceptual apparatus of dialogistics from the later layers of pluralism, relativism, ecstatic communication and the neoliberal discource of ironic otherness. Based on the comparison of the universal ethics and the ethics of the Other, a formula is proposed for reconciling unity and diversity, embodied in the symbolic hypostases of I, You, Other, and We. Methodologically, the article deals with M. Buber’s teachings about the “sphere between” and “communicating silence”, E. Levinas’s theory about “face” and “nakedness” in comparison with the Freudomarxist analysis of the Ljubljana and French schools (A. Zupanchich, A. Badiou), as well as with Russian civilizationist approaches (N.Ya. Danilevsky, Yu.M. Lotman). The author compares such concepts as Buber’s “I–You”  and A. Zupanchich’s “love” as a “comedy” at the level of intersubjectivity, A. Badiou’s “Immortal” and E. Levinas’s “responsibility” at the level of the subject «I», hypostasis in Levinasism and truth-event in Badjuanism at the level of the Other, the dynamics of a dialogue between cultures from primitive unity through separation to reunification, from colonization through acculturation to ethization in the Russian civilizational school. The author claims that it is possible ti reconcile international universalism, traditional particularism and plural personalism as phenomena of modern, premodern and postmodern culture on the basis of a semiotic connection between syntagma and paradigm, metaphysics and dialectics on the principle of “matryoshka”, i.e. a symphony of the whole through the small and a symphony of small through the whole on the macro-, meso- and micro-levels of interaction.