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Part of
Dialogic Ethics
Edited by Ronald C. Arnett and François Cooren
[Dialogue Studies 30] 2018
► pp. 25–44

Impassible peace

Enmity and the frozen figures of intractability

This essay investigates the construction of enemy-Others through a post-Freudian notion of dreamwork, as developed in Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophy of the figure. Of critical interest is Lacan’s contention that the unconscious is structured like a language. A fragment of a dream is presented and analyzed as a way to reveal how figuration functions in dreams as images and forms related to enemy-Others and how engagement of the figure-matrix can loosen intractability and engage dialogue, albeit in agony. The essay takes up enmity’s destablizing consequences for innocent others, which in turn leads to a critical discussion of Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the abyss of otherness out of which the ethical injunction arises, and concludes by considering implications for dialogic ethics.

Keywords: dreamwork, figural, discourse, ethical injunction, otherness
Article outline
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2.Dreaming the enemy
    • 2.1Dreamwork that does not speak
    • 2.2A figural analysis
  • 3.Implications for dialogical ethics
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.30.02sim
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