Ethics and Politics at the Crossroads of Languages

Abstract

Languages intersect where ethics and politics also meet. No identity is entirely self-contained, nor does any language remain pure: both emerge through their relation with what exceeds and unsettles them. Yet the logic of identity and the nation-state often turns difference into threat and the other into an enemy, making exclusion, violence, and death possible conditions of self-affirmation. Within this same horizon, language may relinquish its capacity for hospitality and translation and become an instrument of war, subjected to discourses that silence, homogenize, or erase otherness. Against this logic of the Same, heteronomy makes it possible to conceive a subjectivity that is always preceded and addressed by the other. Translation then appears not merely as a passage between languages, but as a condition of language itself and as a possible space of ethical and political resistance. A rereading of Babel through the promise of plurality, together with the examination of the Palestine-Israel conflict, reveals the consequences of imposing a single language, identity, or narrative. Where translation necessarily remains unfinished, listening to the voice of the other opens the possibility of imagining a politics different from war: a politics of otherness.