Notes for the Traveller: Introduction to the Journey Ahead

Abstract

In the first of the epigraphs above, Judith Butler lays down a challenge to scholars of the humanities. She asks us to turn our attention to the very figure of the human from which we derive our name and to interrogate what our responsibilities for the protection of the human might be. Such a task requires, as life-long mediator and peace-builder Paul Lederach writes, harnessing the power of imagination. Lederach urges us to think beyond violence, to think what might be otherwise. Emmanuel Levinas, like Lederach, urges us to think beyond ourselves, stating that ethical work means to ‘envisage […] a time without me, to aim at this world without me, to aim at a time beyond the horizon of my time’ (Basic Philosophical Writings 50). Such ‘thinking beyond’ involves a re-visioning of the given, which he suggests is the role of metaphor. Metaphor’s ‘absent contents’ point to what is beyond the given and ‘makes perception possible’ (36). Together the collective voices of Butler, Lederach and Levinas speak to the need for both creativity and compassion in the face of the acts of violence that each writes in response to. This book takes up the task of replying to these authors through offering an expanded understanding of the role that theatricality has to be play in making available to us the lost voices of absent others in order that they may urge us beyond the horizon of our own time and experience.

If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense.

Judith Butler, Precarious Life 151

To fully understand the moral imagination we will need to explore the geographies of violence that are known and the nature of risk and vocation, which permits the rise of an imagination that carries people toward a new, though mysterious, and often unexpected shore.

Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination 39

I think that the human consists precisely in opening itself to the other of the other, in being preoccupied with his death.

Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? 124