Perhaps Coleridge’s clearest definition of the dynamic between alterity and identity is in his marginalia, specifically to the writings of Jakob Bohme. In contemplating the impossible unity of opposites, Coleridge writes:
+A passes into +B to lose itself, and in the next instant retracts itself in order to give an Alterity to +B, and this in order to lose itself in another form by loving the self of another as another—(CM, 1:680)
Coleridge comes back again and again to the concept of alterity to explore the classic Romantic dilemma of selfhood as simultaneously same and other, alienated and unified, fragmented and whole, connected and distinct. Ultimately he views the self as capable of sacrifice for the other but also as expansive through transcendence.
Today, in philosophy, identity politics, and postmodern theory, in recalling and developing the concept of alterity, we are using Coleridge’s terminology and concept of “outness” or “otherness,” and are revising a classic Romantic problem of attempts to reconcile seeming opposites. The concept is central to philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, anthropologists such as Michael Taussig, and literary theorists as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In 1982, A. J. Greimas and J. Courtes called alterity a “non-definable concept, which is in opposition to another concept of the same sort, identity,” two terms which at least can be defined by way of reciprocity.26 Likewise, Mark C. Taylor’s recent study of alterity concedes (using an alternate spelling) that “‘Altarity’ is a slippery word whose meaning can be neither stated clearly nor fixed firmly.”27 Though never completely decidable, Taylor says that the linguistic field of “Altarity” can be approached through the network of its associations: “altar, alter, alternate, alternative, alternation, alterity.”28 He provides a thorough genealogy of the concept, starting with Hegel and devoting a chapter each to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Kristeva, Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida, and Kierkegaard. Thus, despite alterity’s nondefinable quality, it is frequently used in Coleridge’s original sense, to explain how the self tends toward, desires, seeks, and needs the other in order to distinguish itself and realize its subjectivity.
More importantly, recent discussions have shifted the domain of alterity from transcendental philosophy to social/historical investigation. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, for example, in their Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (1990), designate “alterity” the best word to use in the study of ontology and identity politics. Unlike the term “otherness,” “alterity’ shifts the focus of philosophic concern away from the epistemic other’ to the concrete ‘moral other’ of practices—political, cultural, linguistic, artistic, and religious. This is consistent with the movement from the concerns of modern philosophy of knowledge and of the subject to the more decentered philosophies of post-modernism.”29 Although Coleridge does not explicitly reserve alterity for moral otherness, this ethical dimension of alterity is implied in his writings, especially on slavery. In his Lecture on the Slave Trade, Coleridge begins with the grandest possibilities for the “Imagination,” equating it with “glittering Summits” and “Alpine endlessness,” only to condemn its powerful uses in the execution and maintenance of colonialism: “horrible has been its misapplication,” he writes (Lects 1795, 235–36). The Lecture goes on to engage the imagination in alterity by detailing the sufferings that the slave trade had, up to that time, instigated. Thus, even though the notion of alterity seems to be transhistorical and trans-cultural, it does, in fact, lend itself to historical and cultural specifics, like the relationship between Britons and Africans in the nineteenth century.
Coleridge’s investigations into the concept of alterity, its moral possibilities and responsibilities, find their fullest extension in the works of Emmanuel Levinas (although Levinas was not influenced directly by Coleridge’s writings but developed his philosophy in the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger). Born in Lithuania, educated in Russia and Germany, and naturalized French in the 1930s, Levinas went on to become one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, producing a number of important works, including two major philosophical texts, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being; or, Beyond Essence.30 The originality of Levinas’s thought emerges from his synthesis of ethical philosophy and Talmudic commentary, but readers also cannot help sensing the enormous personal energy that characterizes all his works. This is especially true of the collections of lectures and interviews, such as Thinking-of-the-Other: Entre Nous and Ethics and Infinity, the latter a wonderfully readable set of interviews conducted by the philosopher Philippe Nemo.31
In fact, the most striking qualities of Levinas’s works are their accessibility and their immediate applicability to politics, aesthetics, and history. Indeed, it is a little surprising that his work has not been used to examine the relationships between Romanticism and slavery before now. In 1998, a small collection of essays entitled “Alterity in Discourses of Romanticism” appeared, which suggested applying Levinas’s ideas to Romanticism, and in 1999 David P. Haney wrote an eye-opening essay called “Aesthetics and Ethics in Gadamer, Levinas, and Romanticism,” but neither of these has generated any large-scale studies.32 It is safe to assume that Levinas would have welcomed an application of his thought to questions of slavery and empire, since he was generally enthusiastic when his philosophy informed political insights and social activism. In 1982, for instance, Levinas was told that various attempts had been made to apply his philosophy to Marxism, to which he replied, “I have gotten to know a very sympathetic South American group that is working out ‘liberation philosophy.’… I am very happy, very proud even, when I find reflections of my work in this group. It is a fundamental approval.”33 One of the reasons Levinas’s theories are applicable is his bold rejection of grand philosophical schemes coupled with his use of elegantly simple phrases like “the face-to-face” and “responsibility for the other.”34 But most of all, Levinas’s philosophy is attractive because he moves beyond polemics of guilt and blame to a different plane altogether. Levinas’s work allows for an ethical connection between self and other in a post-slavery and post-Holocaust world. In this book, I invoke Levinas to provide a philosophical explanation to the previous discussions of the imaginative self as sacrificial and expansive. His work helps explain how some Romantic writers approached the African other of slavery and exploration in their creative work.
Like Coleridge, Levinas describes alterity as the self’s responsibility for the other, as the self’s imperative to place the other at the center of his or her own being, and as the self’s desire to respect and preserve the difference of that other. Alterity in this sense is a relation that does not compromise the selfhood of the other. Because alterity carries an ethical dimension, a reciprocity or responsibility for the other, for Levinas “eros” (as the key dimension of alterity) becomes the only way to recognize the other. Indeed, eros occupies a primary place in relationships. It is, writes Levinas, “a relationship with alterity, with mystery—that is to say, with the future, with what (in a world where there is everything) is never there, with what cannot be there when everything is there—not with a being that is not there, but with the very dimension of alterity.”35 And just as Coleridge attributes alterity to the idea of God and thus to transcendental being, so Levinas describes alterity as the “proximity and the uncanniness of God” who is present in the face-to-face encounter: “Transcendence is what turns its face towards us,” he writes. Further, thought awakened to the transcendence of alterity “believes itself to go beyond the world or to listen to a voice more intimate than intimacy” (original emphasis).36 In this way, the imaginative self can be both sacrificial and expansive.
Levinas conceives of consciousness as always involved with the other in a state of proximity, or presence, which he describes as the “face-to-face.” This is close to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of the intimacy produced by the touch. In Merleau-Ponty, explains Levinas, “one hand touches the other, the other hand touches the first; the hand, consequently, is touched and touches the touching—one hand touches the touching. A reflexive structure: it is as if space were touching itself through the man.”37