Thesis Supervisor: Doreen Mende

Thesis: A Note In Several Tenses / On the Temporality of Subjectivity and Otherness

Enschede, 2009

ABSTRACT

This thesis deals with the relation between subjectivity and Otherness from different points of departure. Whether the 'Other' is understood as absolute alterity or not, whether understood as the 'object' or an 'object of knowledge', a 'body' or an 'event', a 'human Other' or an 'inhuman Other', 'language', 'temporality', 'presence', or 'absence'; what this thesis basically focuses on is the ethicality of the subject/Other relation. The subject's relation to the Other, argued as being in itself the domain of temporality, is to be seen as a primarily and fundamentally ethical relation, where ethics precedes every traditional ontological account on being. Temporality and Spatiality, I suggest in the end of the thesis, are not two domains through which subjectivity should be understood, but rather two readings of one and only domain that constitutes subjectivity: the domain of the Other.
The text fluctuates between worldly associations and philosophical/theoretical ones. It starts with a review on an exhibition and ends with a review on an art project, while in the middle it concentrates on a process of thinking, reading, defining and re-defining subjectivity and Otherness particularly in relation to Emmanuel Levinas's thoughts on 'ethics as first philosophy'.
As an artist who is interested in speech, lecture performances and conversations as an artistic medium, this thesis tries to trace back the motives for my particular interest in performativity. The temporality of the face to face encounter between myself a subject and the addressee as an Other is the question that I would like to articulate in terms of ethics, and ethical concerns.

Author: Rana Hamadeh