sameness or as a way of enhancing its own multiplicity (40). Departing from Western metaphysics, Levinas’s concept of the subject offers an alternative conception of the other. In Levinas, the other is superior to the subject. Furthermore, the other is a separate and an absolutely other being, who is beyond the intentionality of self and outside the totality of representation. However, this separate other is a prerequisite for the subject to be ethical and to lead a meaningful life. As Levinas maintains, the other frees the subject “from the enchainment to itself, where the ego suffocates in itself due to the tautological way of identity” (Otherwise 160). Similarly, Johanna Oksala in Foucault on Freedom explains that,
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the other as radical alterity importantly opens the constituted subject to what it is not, to what it cannot grasp, possess or know…[T];he other is capable of introducing alterity to the constituted subject. The other makes ethical subjectivity possible, but also breaks the totality of constituted experiences by introducing a plurality in being that resists all efforts of totalization and normalization. Only the other ultimately reveals the limits of subjectivity and gives the attempt to transgress them an ethical meaning. (207)
The other is so elemental in the subject’s opening himself to other and to his surroundings that in his notion of subjectivity, Levinas gives the primacy to the other rather than to the self.
Thirdly, Levinas offers a radical understanding of the role of vision in interpersonal relation. In the Western societies, the relationship between the self and the other is primarily conceived of as a visual relation. As Levinas observes, “vision is essentially an adequation of exteriority with interiority: in it exteriority is reabsorbed in the contemplative soul and, as an adequate idea, revealed to be a priori, the result of a Sinngebung” (Totality 295). In our case, it can be asserted that although Auster strives for an ethical relation on the one hand, he also represents the difficulty of it on the other hand. For example, in Ghosts, seeing and gazing are elements that threaten the formation of intersubjective relations. Pamuk’s The White Castle in this sense offers an intercultural face-to-face meeting that is conducive to ethical relations that acknowledge the other as other without trying to grasp, comprehend, categorize or read him.
In sum, in this chapter, it is revealed that heterotopias are spaces in which alternative spatial, social and historical orderings are performed. They are not merely “other spaces” or neutral expressions at the margins of a society; on the contrary, they are relational spaces which are counter-hegemonic, ethically and politically laden spaces. Furthermore, I have elaborated on Levinas’s notion of the self and the other, which argues that the other is indispensable for the self’s ethical becoming. Although the self is traumatized in his relationship with the other, nonetheless, in the end, he is endowed with glimpses of response-ability, responsiveness and exteriority. Finally, it should be obvious by now that both heterotopia and ethics will provide a rich venue for illuminating how Auster’s fictions offer alternative and constructive self-other relations, spatial and cultural orderings to emerge.
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4 See Philip J. Ethington. “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History.” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 465–493; Thomas Bender. “Theory, Experience, and the Motion of History.” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 495–500; David Carr. “Commentary on ‘Placing the Past: “Groundwork” for a Spatial Theory of History.’ ” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 501–505; Edward S. Casey. “Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History.” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 507–512; Alun Munslow. “Presenting and/or Re-Presenting the Past.” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 517–524.
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