Language is viewed as mediating with alterity which makes the
subjectís experience unheimlich. For Levinas, the ënon-intentional
consciousnessí
has no name, no situation, no status. It has a presence afraid of presence, afraid
of the insistence of the identical ego, stripped of all qualities. It is the non-
intentionality, not yet at the stage of willing, and prior to any fault, in its non-
intentional identification, identity recoils before its affirmation. It dreads the
insistence in the return to the self that is a necessary part of identification. This
creates the reserve of the stranger or ësojourer on earthí, as it says in the
Psalms, the countryless or ëhomelessí person who dare not enter in.^25Hence, ëone comes not into the world but into questioní which is
expressed in ëthe fear of occupying someone elseís place with the Da
of my Dasein; itís the inability to occupy a placeí.^26 Here we get to an
ethics that questions the foundations of ëthe identical egoí, the home
of the person and the intentionality of subjectivity. Such an inscription
is comparable with the politics of Saidís ëReflection of Life in Exileí
(1984), and the politics of post-colonial and feminist theorization of
subjectivity are indebted to Levinasís ethical philosophies regarding
ontology.^27 The following argument in relation to the poetry of Sara
Berkeley is that her poems call into question the intentionality of
subjectivity and the positioning of identity, with the effect of writing a
nomadic, countryless and homeless text. So how far does Berkeleyís
Facts About Water question the da of dasein and the sovereignty of
subjective knowledge in relation to alterity?
Facing the Flood: A Leaky Ethics
25 Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, p.129.
26 Ibid., pp.129–30.
27 Levinas’s philosophy is the unacknowledged basis of much post-colonial and
feminist thinking, and this warrants further discussion that unfortunately cannot
be covered within the confines of this study.