THE ETHICS OF ALTERITY: CONSTRUCTED CONJUNCTIONS AND THE

EMBRACE OF OTHERNESS

Ming Lim
Faculty of Management
(Judge Business School)
University of Cambridge
Trumpington St., Cambridge CB2 1AG
Cambridge, U.K.

Email: m.lim@jbs.cam.ac.uk

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ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a critique of Levinas’s philosophy of alterity and infinitude in the
context of its implications for organizational practice. I argue that the ethical relation
between Self and Other upon which his work is based is both profound and limited in
its ability to account for social practice. Instead of simply going along with the
common criticism of Levinas, however, that he places an intolerable ethical burden of
infinitude upon human relations, this paper aims to move beyond the impasse by
placing Levinas’s metaphysics within a frame which privileges the dynamic between
Self and Other as a socially-oriented, participative practice of teaching and learning. It
is suggested that Etienne Wenger’s work on the emergence of identity as a constant
negotiation between Others and Self provides a conceptual framework for how
business ethics may be owned, negotiated, learned and taught within a nexus of
communities without sacrificing the horizon of infinitude bestowed upon us by
Levinas’s ethical philosophy.

KEY WORDS:
Alterity; Identity; Participation; Responsibility; Infinity; Business; Ethics

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 THE ETHICS OF ALTERITY: CONSTRUCTED CONJUNCTIONS AND THE
EMBRACE OF OTHERNESS

Levinas’s philosophy of what he calls the “Society of the Self with the Other” poses a
significant – and formidable – challenge for management theorists. This paper proposes
a dialogue between his philosophy of the ethical relation with the Other and a possible
appropriation of it for management practice. It should be stated at the outset that such an
enquiry must take into account the (apparent) incommensurability of Levinasian ethics
and the ends of business. On the one hand, the system of governance we call “business
ethics” is regarded as the necessary (or legally sanctioned) imposition of limits to
behaviour associated with profit and power and where the Other is organized, even
manipulated, to fulfil utilitarian goals. On the other hand, “ethics” is inherently based
upon a demand to consider and transcend the wants of human nature.

This dilemma is virtually unrecognized and untested among our current attempts to frame
questions of “environmental sustainability,” “ethical governance,” “corporate social
responsibility,” and so on, all of which, in fact, incorporate the very structures of
capitalism they purport to criticize (see Harvey 1996). Without theorizing the
metaphysical as well as material practices which acknowledge the “strangeness of the
Other,” the discipline of “management” impoverishes itself; it sustains, rather than
confronts, the ontological incommensurability between “ethics” and “business.” This
paper considers the possibility of moving beyond this difficulty through a comparative
study of Levinas (1969) and Wenger (1998).

If the business of organizing or managing the Other assumes a fundamental ontological

breach, a hierarchy of selves divided by power, possession and suppression, therefore,
this breach appears radically opposed to a metaphysics which calls for serious
responsibility, even an infinite embrace of the Other. Levinas’s desire to locate our
relation with the Other on an original and challenging basis of utter responsibility for the
Other is thus a complex proposition for organizational ethics. By setting up an
opposition between totality and infinity, Levinas opens up significant possibilities for
organizational theories of self, identity and sociality. It also throws up new questions of

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how Levinas’ philosophy works in practice and what its discursive, social and political
effects may be in modern organizational contexts. Our substantive questions in this paper
are, therefore: what constitutes the challenge of Levinasian ethics for business? Where
are the sites of its blindness for organizational ethics and can we frame them differently
in order to invigorate business theory and practice? Fortunately, recent theories of
identity as a socially oriented practice offers a highly relevant critique of Levinas to offer
a real alternative to the ethics of organizational life and I take one of these up in detail as
the argument progresses.

In this paper, I focus on Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (all quotations and references will
refer to the 1969 translation of Levinas which was first published in 1961, hereafter TI)
and, to a lesser extent, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1991 translation,
hereafter OBBE). This paper falls into three parts. First, I shall explore the implications
of Levinasian ethics for the way we relate to the Other qua being. Totality and Infinity,
in particular, calls into question again the boundary between Self and the Other, Identity
and sociality in ways which confound conventional business theory. We then look at
how Levinas’s philosophy raises questions about the nature of our interactions in
organizational settings and our identities as relational beings in those settings. The
second part focuses on Wenger’s (1998) philosophy of meaning and identity as a way of
framing these questions. The context of our negotiations with social reality emerges, in
this section, as a vital dimension in how alterity is constructed and embraced. The final
section tries to suggest a way forward for conceptualizations of alterity and identity in
organizational practice.

1. Levinas
This section opens up Levinas’s metaphysics of transcendence as it pervades human
relations. I shall try to show that Levinas’s metaphysics actually leads to a theory of
human communication which For Levinas, the metaphysical relation between human
beings is characterized by radical alterity, or what he calls “exteriority.” The Other stands
before me as irreducibly present and yet utterly strange, radically “Other”. My
acknowledgement of him must take place in the world of lived relations and expression
but must also leave him in his otherness, as Infinity. And yet this acknowledgement
provokes a “critique of the Same” – the “I,” too, is radically altered by the relation –

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which is why “we name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of
the Other ethics” (Totality and Infinity, p. 43). The Other stands apart from me; I am not
called upon to be enframed or to be subjected to him. I can – indeed, must -- stand firm
in my subjectivity. At the same time, I am called upon to respond to the Other. It is only
by responding that I understand my own freedom. When I do, I am able to respond with
justice and hospitality towards the Other. This act of mine is the infinity which embraces
the Other but also leaves the other intact, countering the totalizing tendency to possess
the Other.

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas sets up this paradox as one which presents the Other as a
longing which overflows my capacity to absorb him, a metaphysical desire “toward
something else entirely, toward the absolutely other” (TI, p. 33, original italics). The
Other stands apart from me and yet I contain it in my subjectivity, not because I need to,
but because I desire this other-orientation for that which transcends my experiences and
my universe. As we shall see, Levinas takes this argument even further in Otherwise
than Being or Beyond Essence (1991). There, he argues for a response to the Other that
culminates in my substitution of myself for him. I am responsible for the Other before
the Other presences itself. If I fail to do that, I fail to embrace his alterity. This failure is
a form of totalization. Totality is systematic, orderly, separative. Infinity, by contrast, is
sensing, feeling, an embrace of the Other. This contrast is the basis for Levinas’
philosophy of the ethical relation with the Other.

Levinas proposes an ethics, therefore, which, while it allows us to speak of the possession
of things (which is why we need houses to store them in), we can never possess people.
We can only be conscious them as that which is not us, not our-self, but which is distinct
from non-human things. This consciousness of the human is why we find the face so
appealing and yet so difficult to absorb. Its “mute appeal” -- the “depths of defenseless
eyes” -- root us to the ground as we realize our subjectivity in the moment of
acknowledging the Other. Feeling the Other throws us back upon our subjectivity, but
now our subjectivity is understood to be essentially non-violent because it does not seek
to possess the Other – it is the “non-allergic relation with alterity” (p. 47). It finds
tyranny or totalization of the Other impossible, let alone murder of the Other. The
unalterable difference between Self and Other does not mean the end of relationship,

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therefore; it means we are free to enjoy the other without dissolving the Other in our Self.
We misapprehend the Other if we think that we relate to the Other only through “a
reduction of the other to the same” (p. 46). Instead of reducing the Other to the same,
Levinas calls us to celebrate the infinity of subjectivity, an impossible exigency – “the
astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain” (p. 27). In this way,
subjectivity overflows itself, finds itself inadequate and yet fully containing the Other in
his radical alterity. Subjectivity is the embrace of that which overflows subjective
relations and contains in itself the surplus which makes possible the relationship with that
which is infinitely distant. In this relationship, the Self is conscious not of the need to
establish social intercourse with the Other and others, but simply the desire to do so.
This Desire is one of non-craving, of enjoyment and, for Levinas, a way of entering into
an ethical relation with the Other which does not possess him or her.

For Levinas, philosophy is about this Great possibility. For him, there is no other way to
construct the conjunction between the Self and the Other except through this infinite
responsibility for the Other. The responsibility is based upon an apparent contradiction,
however: the Other as akin to me, and yet he or she must be left intact. How is this
paradoxical relation to the other achieved? What accomplishes this calling into question?
For Levinas, the answer lies in language and conversation. Language allows me to
“recognize the Other, to come to him across the world of possessed things, but at the
same time to establish, by gift, community and universality” (p. 63). Through language,
Levinas elides the violence which is invariably invoked in the relationship of the Same
with the Other because speaking allows the Other to absolve himself from the relation
with me and me from him. “I” cannot interrupt his continuity or command him to play a
role which is inauthentic for him because for me, this communication was always derived
from generosity first, a prior welcoming of his face:

Over him I have no power. He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension even if I have him
at my disposal. He is not wholly in my site. But I, who have no concept in common with the
Stranger, am, like him, without genus. We are the same and the other (TI, p. 39).

The relation with the Other, therefore, is not predicated upon power. Power thematizes
and conceptualizes identity and this is where Levinas criticizes ontology:

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 Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues in the State and in the non-
violence of the totality, without securing itself against the violence from which this non-
violence lives, and which appears in the tyranny of the State (TI, p. 46).

Philosophy has long placed ontology above metaphysics, Being above the existent. The
terms have to be reversed, according to Levinas. It is the existent, rather than Being,
which “breaks through all the envelopings and generalities of Being to spread out in its
‘form” the totality of its “content,” finally abolishing the distinctions between form and
content (TI, P. 51). This breaking out is achieved through expression, my expressiveness
of openness towards the Other, becoming “conversation.” In so doing, I receive more
than what I can receive: this means I am taught by the Other. Teaching brings me more
than what I can contain.

This exchange of “transcendental energy” (TI, p.170) embodies infinity in all its
paradoxical grandeur because “The Other – the absolutely other – paralyzes possession,”
(TI, p. 171) and, in so doing, breaks the limited envelope of my subjectivity. Because the
Other comes not from the outside (the term “exteriority” notwithstanding) but from
above, this exchange calls my Identity into question – Levinas, somewhat confusingly,
calls this exchange “language” -- and obliges me to be conscious that I receive from the
Other more than what I can contain (TI, p. 51). The human subject has the astonishing
capacity, in Levinas’ eyes, to “contain in itself what it can neither contain or receive
solely by virtue of its own identity”, which is the “feat of containing more than it is
possible to contain” (TI, p. 27). In welcoming the Other, infinity is consummated. Again,
both “I” and the “Other” can leave the other intact, can leave the relation, and thus
maintain the Other’s singularity, the Other’s alterity. Thus, it is dissociation, not an
endless, potentially suffocating gathering (Versammlung) that makes relationship
possible. It is the ground and condition, not the negation of, relationship. This dialectic is
what Levinas and Blanchot call “the relationless relation.” This is the condition of
infinity.

In order to represent this relationship of paradoxical alterity to myself, I become

conscious that the Other comes at me from a great height. Language is the mediating
factor, the bond across the infinity. Now, how language is produced is even more
interesting. It produces itself through what Levinas calls “teaching”. Put another way,

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teaching signifies the infinity of my relationship with the Other and is the key dimension
of infinity. Teaching is almost prior to language; it is the first act of ethics it produces
infinity in this relationship with the other. The Other teaches me without dominating me:

It is fundamentally pacific…the Other is not another freedom as arbitrary as my own in which

case it would traverse the infinity that separates me from him and enter under the same concept.
His alterity is manifested in a mastery that does not conquer, but teaches (TI, p. 171)(my
italics).

We have come very far from the conventional understanding that Levinasian ethics posits
language, conversation and meaning as the original modes of relationship to the Other.
Derrida, for instance, reads Levinas as “making the origin of language, meaning and
difference the relation to the infinitely other” (1978, p. 151). Instead, we may, with equal
validity, argue that teaching makes the relation to the Other possible through language,
meaning and so on. Teaching is the originary relationship to the Other. What Levinas
has failed to recognize, however, is that language is already difference. “By permitting
the same and Being to circulate within it,” as Derrida observes, Levinas contradicts his
own intentions of subsuming difference under language.

If teaching is the original ground of language, however, then this paradoxical relation
with the Other which Levinas theorizes is a theme that needs to be probed more deeply.
The mastery of distance and a potentially insuperable, even oppressive, alterity through
teaching hints at, but does not satisfactorily resolve fundamental issues in our experience
of others in the world, especially in the context of the world of work. To the extent that
our lives within organizations occupy our subjectivity and shape it so profoundly, how
can we theorize infinity as an ethic for the communities in which we work? How exactly
does subjectivity welcome the Other while leaving the Other intact? Where and how can
“community” be founded in this phenomenology of the self, apart from Levinas’ brief
analysis of the “family” and “Eros”? Is “Identity” of the Same to be found only, or
mostly, in this relationless relation with the Other or is some other process of sociality
and mutual cognition involved? If so, what is its architecture or form? Does infinity and
Desire extend to the world of work? Is there a way out of the strangely rigid I-Other
relation Levinas describes? These are questions which are alluded to in Totality and

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Infinity, but they do not bloom in the text as questions qua identity. Let me take these
questions now and frame them against Wenger’s (1998) theory of identity and sociality.

II. Wenger
Wenger, too, works from a phenomenology (he explicitly acknowledges Heidegger
(1927) as the context for his work), but he raises the metaphysical stakes from an ethical
point of view. The key point of departure for Wenger is that he shifts our conception of
alterity to other selves and to the production of community as a result of that conception.
In other words, not only do I feel other selves as different and Other from me, they
change my ethical being and I theirs. This change or dynamic emerges not from my
possessing the Other but from my owning my identity as I engage with others. All
quoted references below derive from his key text on identity as a negotiated dynamic
with others, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (1998), unless
otherwise stated.

Wenger works from a phenomenology which tries to go beyond our experience of the
Other to one which finds itself in an inextricable relation with other selves as part of lived
experience. For Wenger, identity is vested in a negotiation between two dualities which
“require and enable each other” (p. 66) – “participation” and “reification.” Participation
does not only mean engaging with the Other; it is a means by which I recognize the
Other, a means to recognize our mutuality. He states: “by recognizing the mutuality of
our participation, we become part of each other” (p.56). So central is this notion of
participation (and it means much more than mere practices of engagement) that Wenger
founds his notion of identity upon it – he calls it “an identity of participation,” that is, “an
identity constituted through relations of participation” (p. 56). Therefore, participation is
not optional, as it were, “something I can turn on and off” (p.57). It is part of who and
what I am.

And so, Identity is incomplete. It requires the approach of the Other but also my active
participation in the Other’s identity-structure. Participation desires reification.
Reification does not simply mean giving “thingness” to abstractions; it also refers, in
Wenger’s terms, to processes of naming, encoding, describing, interpreting and so on --
in other words, it is a form of language, a languaging in, and of, the world of lived

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relations. It is the interplay of participation and reification which makes up Identity and
allows us to accommodate the Other. “Participation” and “reification” have the effect of
spatializing and situating the I-Other relation in a way that is constantly negotiated and
negotiable, and, therefore, opens the way for me to bring the Other with me into society.
Infinity, therefore, is in the process of this interplay, not only in the relations which are
the outcome – or not – of it.

Now, Wenger takes the argument further. According to him, this interplay is learned as
we live. We cannot help it. It is also what and who we are. In this sense, Identity is
profoundly historical. It is negotiated and renegotiated as a process of learning which
allows us to accommodate social relations as a dynamic nexus of difference-without-
violence, what allows me to relate to the Other but also what makes the painful knowing
of the Other available to, and possible for, me. My subjectivity, therefore, is constantly
being negotiated as a history of practices which I learn from engaging with others. I am
responsible to the others to the extent that they recognize that my “currency within an
economy of meaning where it is recognized as a legitimate contender” (Wenger, p. 201).
Membership of these communities would not preclude violence, for the “appropriation by
some (members) can entail alienation from others” (p. 201).

Allowing people this means of describing and re-describing the changing conditions of
their subjectivity allows Wenger to theorize ethics as an outcome rather than the prior
ground, of being and identity-formation. Not only does the Other leave my subjectivity
intact, therefore, I can learn to claim ownership of my identity within this relationship
with the Other because I am rooted in many networks at the same time. I can choose to
reconcile, displace or overshadow divergent or even closely aligned meanings without
necessarily hurting the Other’s freedom. This choice constitutes my learned identity
which is, in turn, grounded in a Being which admits and accommodates difference
without only resorting to the Same:

The careful weaving of (a) nexus of multimembership into an identity can therefore be a very
private achievement. By incorporating into the definition of the person the diversity of the
social world, the social notion of a nexus of multimembership thus introduces into the concept
of identity a deeply personal dimension of individuality (p. 161).

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The social facilitates the individual. The Other grounds my Being. Difference permits
the Same to circulate within a “history of shared practices,” in other words, without
denying the potential for disruption or tension. By virtue of the my membership in
shared practices of work, play and other forms of being, I am not only taught, therefore --
I can also learn. This complementarity between the Other’s approach/demand and my
identification or negotiability with that demand through communities of practice defines
my identity.

It is this complementarity between Self and Other that fleshes out the ethical philosophy
of infinity in Wenger’s work. It is neither the “I” nor the “Other,” either separately or
together which founds ethics, but in the mutual play of the forms of our participation
and/or reification in the world. These forms themselves, according to Wenger, are what
persist through time and allow us to “visit “otherness””; our access to these forms is what
he calls “imagination”:

Imagination allows us to adopt other perspectives across boundaries and time, to visit
“otherness” and let it speak its own language. It also allows us to include history in our sense
of the present and to explore possible futures. It can produce representations and models that
trigger new interpretations. In turn, engagement provides a place for imagination to land, to be
negotiated in practice and realized into identities of participation. This process requires an
opening of participation that allows imagination to have effects beyond itself so that we may
learn from it by bringing it back into a form of engagement (p. 217).

Language is thus not just the bond between “Self” and “Other”; it is also what makes the
other “Other.” This private universe of meaning, according to Levinas, is what we learn
to honour and either converge towards, or diverge from, and is thus (simultaneously)
always available to us as a form of social life and practice.

III. Constructed Conjunctions: Levinas and Wenger

Levinas writes: “The Other, as other is not only an alter ego. It is what I myself am not”
(TI and OBBE). The sense of an irreducible alterity which must also include the
proximity of the Other (based on the recognition that I am myself “other” for others) is
the locus for the ethics of Levinas and Wenger, as we have discussed them here. This
section summarizes their views and aims to to clarify the points at which they illuminate
each other and our consideration of business ethics.

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The key contribution of Levinas’s philosophy to an ethics of alterity is his account of the
encounter with the absolutely-other. Installing ethics as first philosophy, prior to the
ontology of Being, Levinas calls upon the relation with the Other as absolute distance
and absolute proximity. The way he accounts for this relation is “opened on the basis of
the human face” (TI). The approach of the Other (the face) compels responsibility
without reservation or possession. Because the Other is infinitely distant, I am left intact
in my ineffable solitude and hence, my relation to the Other is essentially non-violent,
born of Desire rather than of Need, of enjoyment rather than fear, of freedom rather than
of possession. The Other can always absolve himself from this relation with me,
therefore, since Levinas criticizes every notion of domination.

Indeed, the relation with the Other comes at me from above (since neither I nor the Other
can grasp or dominate the other) and overflows my subjectivity. He is infinitely more
than I can contain and yet I contain him. Levinas calls the bond which traverses this
infinitude language, conversation, meaning. Through these means, the Other teaches me.

Thus described, Levinas’s philosophy is a radical examination of the obligations of the

Self to the Other. It is a most rigorous and resolute exegesis on the absolute exteriority of
our relation with the Other but leaves the question of how this relation is already a kind
of organization and a form of social life. Indeed, there is no sense in which Levinas
recognizes that our relation with the an economy of meaning might look like in his ethics
of alterity. It is also fair to say that he does not satisfactorily account for It is to Wenger
that we turn to for an interpretation of how Self relates to others within a nexus of
meanings which exist prior to Self and yet define my subjectivity.

Wenger directly acknowledges the potential for ethical alterity, for both trust and
negativity, passivity and violence, but also opens up the field of mutual knowing to a
framework of negotiation and control. My subjectivity, according to him, is interwoven
with my sense of others as part of a social practice. This sociality consists in shared
histories and my participation in them as a member of a nexus of organizations. My
social identity is thus driven by personal memberships of these organizations and also by
my individual reconciliation of conflicting, potentially violent, practices in organizations.

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My personal calling, therefore, is to learn the dynamics of negotiating with others as my
participation or reification as a member of different communities waxes or wanes,
depending on what I choose to admit as part of my experience in the world.

Wenger thus informs us about the forms of alterity in a way which complements and
extends Levinas’s metaphysics. More accurately, his philosophy of social learning re-
situates “identity,” “alterity” and our ways of participating in these forms of life. We are
free to participate or reify our trajectory of experience with others while leaving them
intact. We are able to let be their personal histories of meaning:

…forms of participation and reification continually converge and diverge. In moment of

negotiation of meaning, they come into contact and affect each other. But converging in such
moments is the extent of their connection. They shape each other in such moments, but they
are not bound to each other. They are not otherwise essentially coupled in time. They do not
lock in. They unfold in different media until they meet again in new moments of negotiation
((p. 87).

IV. Conclusion
The work of Levinas and Wenger investigate the many paradoxes and contradictions at
the heart of a metaphysics of Self and Other. One can fairly say that the reconstitution of
our selves and the Other is an enterprise that has barely taken root in our teaching and
learning of “business ethics.” This paper argues that the implications of the “ethics of
alterity” can be much more focused as a result of such an investigation, particularly in our
experience of the world and others. A larger issue is that a metaphysical horizon is
desperately needed in our teaching and learning of business ethics – at the moment, it is
an enterprise dominated largely by its legalistic and economic aspects (governance,
labour process theory, sociological theory, policy structures and so on).

These are ontologies. At it stands at the moment, corporate ethics is “inadmissible to a

philosopher” (TI, p. 171). This paper has aimed to draw out the implications of a
comparative approach so that we can and do admit alterity and its implications:

a. Many so-called “exemplary” discussions of ethics in business fail to recognize the

paradoxes of alterity and therefore remain fixed in what Levinas calls “an
ontology of the Same,” not fully acknowledging the radical otherness of the

13
 subject and thus depriving it of its alterity. Levinas’s theory proposes that we
enjoy the Other in his proximity as well as his infinite distance from me. We are
not simply stared at by the Other (Raffel 1999, p. 51). And we do not have to
play the role of observing the Other. His presence to me is already a calling to be
utterly responsible and to experience the relation as sensuous enjoyment.
Wenger’s theory of identity as a duality between participation and reification
facilitates conceptions of the “situatedness” of everyday life and thus extends the
insights of Levinas into the material realm.
b. Teaching and learning the ethics of alterity becomes an adventure of attentiveness
to the Other’s freedom to align with, or diverge from, my personal history as a
constant negotiation between reconciliation or violence. I cannot bind the Other
to me. I can, however, choose to reconcile my subjectivity with the communities
I engage with.

This paper has established a framework of questioning and the further possibilities
remain to be discussed. It is clear that both Levinas and Wenger theorize alterity in
ways which can and should invigorate business ethics, organizational practice and a
renewed sense of our place in multiple worlds. The welcoming, responsive stance
Levinas insists upon, together with Wenger’s framework of social learning and the
the liberating potential we have for learning to steer and own our personal histories in
the context of communities, I suggest, may move our study of business ethics to its
natural place among the pantheon of philosophical works dedicated to infinity and
history.

__________________________________________________________________

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References
Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. Alan Bass (trans.). London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.

Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford,

Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Heidegger, M. (1927, translated 1962). Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row.

Levinas, E. (1974/1981). Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. A. Lingis (trans.).
Pittsburg, P.A.: Duquesne University Press.

Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. A. Lingis (trans.).

Pittsburg, P.A.: Duquesne University Press.

Raffel, S. (1999). If Goffman Had Read Levinas. Edinburgh working paper in sociology,
No. 17, University of Edinburgh.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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