"Alter's presence" [2019] ELECD 1383; in Broekman, M. Jan (ed), "Rethinking Law and Language" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) 172

Book Title: Rethinking Law and Language

Editor(s): Broekman, M. Jan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: Alter’s presence

Number of pages: 35

Abstract/Description:

The presence of the other is the riddle embedded in all background issues of human speech. There is no speech nor any related linguistic phenomenon without or beyond the other’s presence, real or imagined, and this otherness is always difficult to classify in linguistic terms. That is a vulnerable situation: what value has our speech/language if the other cannot become an object of linguistic utterance? Alter’s immanence in words is analyzed in many aspects: defining the word, the speech act as event, the grammarian power, the utterance of a “Groundword” in the sense of Buber’s dialogic philosophy or Levinas’ phenomenology of time, especially the value of diachronic time experience. The central position of this presence is a crucial moment in rethinking the law–language theme.