Returning to the other, returning to Levinas: the impossibility of satisfaction in intercultural communication

ABSTRACT

How can Levinas’s work help language educators respond ethically to encounters with students? This paper considers this question in the context of adult immigrants learning an additional language, and is interested specifically in the existential aspects of language learning. How does the experience of coming into being in a new language play out in the classroom encounter, and how, if at all, can language teachers respond ethically to this experience? The paper discusses three challenges when considering Levinas’s ethics to answer this question. The first is that language education is dominated by what Levinas calls ‘the Said’. The second is that the impossibility of knowing whether one has responded ethically results in a compulsive return to the pedagogical scene. The third and final challenge involves the tensions between Levinas’s ethics and political critiques of language education.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural communication
• language education
• Levinas

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Names used are pseudonyms.

2. We capitalise ‘Saying’ and ‘Said’ when we use these words in their specific, Levinasian, sense to mark their distinction from the everyday sense of the words.

3. We capitalise the word ‘Other’ to emphasise the otherness (alterity) of the other person, which is at the heart of our discussion. For further discussion on translational challenges of l’autre, l’Autre, autrui, and Autrui in Levinas’s work, see Galetti (2015).