In our search for effectiveness and efficiency, how ruthlessly unforgiving, how intolerant to noise, blunders, hesitations, detours, breakdowns, stammerings, rumblings, creakings, murmurs we have become.
In our self-absorbed search for sameness, how insensitive to the otherness of the other -- his face, her voice, his body, her time and rhythm, his vulnerability, her struggles, his faults and demons, her loneliness, his difference, our irreducible uniqueness.
How deaf to the unruly, unpredictable murmur of the world.
How sadly in-humane it has all become.
* * *
To address someone is not simply to address a source of information; it is to address one who will answer and answer for his or her answer. The time delay, between statement and response, is the time in which the other, while fully present there before one, withdraws into the fourth dimension -- reaffirming his or her otherness, rising up behind whatever he presents of himself, and rising up ever beyond whatever I represent of her and present to her -- to contest it or to confirm it.
To enter into conversation with another is to lay down one's arms and one's defenses; to throw open the gates of one's own positions; to expose oneself to the other, the outsider; and to lay oneself open to surprises, contestation, and inculpation. It is to risk what one found or produced in common. To enter into conversation is to struggle against the noise, the indifference, and the vested interests, the big brother and little Hitlers always listening to -- in order to expose oneself to the alien, the Balinese and the Aztec, the victims and the excluded, the Palestinians and the Quechuas and the Crow Indians, the dreamers, the mystics, the mad, the tortured, and the birds and the frogs. One enters into conversation in order to become an other for the other.
--Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 87-88.
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