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14:26

(In »Syntheist temples and monasteries in the global empire«)

Without this blind ethics there is no subject for Levinas. Only in the meeting between strangers does metaphysical infinity appear. The relationship between the isolated subject and the isolated object, as its emotionally overburdened target, can hardly be made clearer than with Levinas. And what in fact was individualism’s built-in logical terminus if not this fundamentally banal mystification of the other? The only discernible way out is to make a clean break with individualism, as syntheism is doing. There is no cohesive subject which experiences itself as a permanent essence, either in itself or as a bizarre by-product of the romantic worship of the other. Instead the entanglement is primary. And in that entanglement, something entirely different from Levinas’ individualist infatuation, with its Abrahamic nostalgia, arrives.