Guoping Zhao (2014). Art as Alterity in Education. Educational Theory. 64 (3): 245-259..

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ART AS ALTERITY IN EDUCATION

Guoping Zhao

College of EducationOklahoma State University

Abstract. In education, art has often been perceived as entertainment and decoration and is the firstsubject to go when there are budget cuts or test-score pressures. Drawing on Emmanuel Lévinas’s idea ofthe primacy of radical alterity that breaks the totality of our being, enables self-transformation and ethics,and ensures community as a totality of singularities, and on Maurice Blanchot’s expansion of radicalalterity to art, Guoping Zhao argues that the role of art in education must be reconsidered and greatlyexpanded. Art as alterity takes students beyond where they are and what they have, and teaches themto appreciate and respect difference and diversity. If art as alterity is so essential to human subjectivityand society, and if education is conceived as a process of human growth and formation, art as alterity isessential to education and needs to be more seriously engaged and more fully integrated into the wholeeducational process instead of being isolated in arts education. Zhao concludes the essay by ponderingthe pedagogical implications of such a reconsideration of art as alterity in education.

Introduction

Since the No Child Left Behind Act, there has been a widespread concern thatwith the heightened emphasis on math and reading test scores, students are receiv-ing reduced educational exposure to art, as well as to science and social studies.The concern has become so strong that the U.S. Department of Education recentlyconducted a nationwide survey on the state of arts education in public schools.The results show that, generally, there is indeed a significant national decline inthe availability and requirement of arts education and that the gap between poorand rich schools is widening.1 Some observers believe that this phenomenon isnot new: “Arts education has been slipping for more than three decades, the resultof tight budgets, an ever-growing list of state mandates… , and a public sense thatthe arts are lovely but not essential.”2 Scholars and arts educators have strivedto convince the public and policymakers that the arts are indeed essential forstudents and for education. They argue that arts education is useful for students’academic achievement and test scores. “Involvement in the arts is associated withgains in math, reading, cognitive ability, critical thinking, and verbal skill.”3 TomHorn, Arizona’s state superintendent of public instruction, suggests that if people“are worried about their [students’] test scores and want a way to get them higher,they need to give kids more arts, not less.”4 Similarly, in a speech he delivered at

1. Cameron Brenchley, “ED Releases New Report on Arts Education in U.S. PublicSchools,” Homeroom (blog), U.S. Department of Education, April 3, 2012, http://www.ed.gov/blog/2012/04/ed-releases-new-report-on-arts-education-in-u-s-public-schools/.

2. Fran Smith, “Why Arts Education Is Crucial, and Who’s Doing It Best,” Edutopia, January 28, 2009,http://www.edutopia.org/arts-music-curriculum-child-development.

3. Ibid.

4. Quoted in ibid.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 64 Number 3 2014© 2014 Board of Trustees University of Illinois

246 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 64 Number 3 2014

Stanford University, the renowned arts educator Elliot W. Eisner raised the ques-tion, “What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?,”answering that “artistically rooted qualitative forms of intelligence” can help withall aspects of education, “from the design of curricula, to the practice of teaching,to the features of the environment in which students and teachers live.”5

In education, the role of art has thus been construed mostly in cognitive andintelligence terms, in addition to its lovely, sweet, and decorative functions. Per-haps David Carr is correct; in contemporary education, the arts are valued largely“as sources of practical or craft knowledge (and as therefore of some economic orcommercial utility).”6 While the ancient Greeks may have considered art’s “greatimpact or influence for good or ill on human life or character, [such an impact] nolonger seems to be nearly so compelling.”7 Even when great efforts are made tointegrate the arts into education, the integration is still mainly for the purpose ofincreasing students’ academic achievement, as seen in the A+ Schools Program,the recent large-scale, arts-based school reform. According to George W. Noblitand colleagues, “The A+ Schools Program is the largest arts-based school reformeffort in recent history, and the only one to have had significant research fundingattached to it.”8 Over ten years and expanding to forty-two schools in North Car-olina and two other states, the reform works to increase arts instruction and artsintegration in schools, and proponents claim that it has been “highly successful.”9

The “central tenet” of this reform is that “arts integration creates varied andrich instruction, thereby increasing the probability that students will be able toacquire and process information in ways that suit their learning strengths.”10 Aglimpse into the classroom shows how students come to encounter and use artin those schools. For example, in Albany Woods Elementary, researchers observedthe following:

A fourth-grade class works on a batik project during art class for several weeks. The projectties into their year-long study of the regions of North Carolina. Groups of students make Batik

5. Elliot W. Eisner, “What Can Education Learn from the Arts About the Practice of Edu-cation?,” The Encyclopedia of Informal Education (2002), http://www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_of_education.htm.

6. David Carr, “Dangerous Knowledge: On the Epistemic and Moral Significance of Arts in Education,”Journal of Aesthetic Education 44, no. 3 (2010): 2.

7. Ibid., 3.

8. George W. Noblit, H. Dickson Corbett, Bruce L. Wilson, and Monica B. McKinney, Creating andSustaining Arts-Based School Reform: The A+Schools Program (New York: Routledge, 2009), vii.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 58.

GUOPING ZHAO is Associate Professor in the School of Educational Studies at Oklahoma StateUniversity, 211 Willard Hall, Stillwater, OK 74078–4045; e-mail< [email protected]>. Her primaryareas of scholarship are philosophy of education, comparative philosophy, and cross-cultural studies ofeducation.

Zhao Art as Alterity in Education 247

prints of the various regions and then the prints are sewn together to form a map of the stateillustrating major geographical and cultural features such as the State Capital and the OuterBanks. Students explain that they are using what they have learned in their classrooms aboutstate geography and state history to design their prints. They add that while doing the printsthemselves, they learn about color mixing and perspective. The students explain how theircurriculum is connected. As one states, “pretty much everything we do in art has to do withNorth Carolina because that is what we are studying this year.” Another adds, “all year wehave been learning about North Carolina through different art forms and then we show whatwe learned through singing it, dancing it, and drawing it.”11

While the A+program views art as fundamental to education, such use ofart in education is still limited and superficial, focusing on art’s decorative andinstrumental function and ignoring the significant and powerful impact art canexert on students’ development as human beings.

Recently, scholars have argued for a broader and stronger role for art ineducation and in human lives in general.12 It is recognized that art provides aunique human experience unlike any other. Art cannot be known in the same waywe know 1+ 1=2. Real art, art that is not just instrumental, entertainment, ordecoration, breaks through the limits of reason,13 offers new ways of living withthe world,14 and does more than just enhancing communion and solidarity. Goodart remains forceful and compelling, enacting transformation in people but stayingoutside of our full grasp. We cannot carry its “essence” or meanings away and leaveit behind, or make it our own — much like Lévinas’s radical alterity, which isbeyond our knowledge but transforms and forms us in new ways.

On the other hand, Lévinas’s introduction of radical alterity, or Otherness,to the formation of human subjectivity and human community has engendered a“renewal” of philosophy in the last several decades.15 In Simon Critchley’s words,“Lévinas offers a convincing account of the primacy of radical alterity, whetherit is the alterity of autrui in Totality and Infinity or the alterity within the sub-ject described in Otherwise than Being.”16 The radical alterity from the face of theOther breaks open the ego’s interiority and helps the formation of an open sub-jectivity that is ethical and transformative. This revitalization of philosophy hasprovided great opportunities for educational theorists to reconsider the kind of sub-ject modern education should produce and to rethink education as the site of ethics.

11. Ibid., 50–51.

12. See, for example, Peter Roberts, “Education and the Limits of Reason: Reading Dostoevsky,”Educational Theory 62, no. 2 (2012): 203–223; and Claudia Ruitenberg, “Learning to Live with Art,”Philosophy of Education 2002, ed. E. Scott Fletcher (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society,2003), 452–460.

13. Roberts, “Education and the Limits of Reason.”

14. Ruitenberg, “Learning to Live with Art.”

15. Lars Iyer, “The Sphinx’s Gaze: Art, Friendship, and the Philosophical in Blanchot and Lévinas,”Southern Journal of Philosophy 39, no. 2 (2001): 190.

16. Simon Critchley, “Il y a — Holding Lévinas’s Hand to Blanchot’s Fire,” in Maurice Blanchot: TheDemand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (New York: Routledge, 1996), 116.


Can art provide access to radical alterity? How would such a notion of artchange the role of art in education? In this article, I draw on Lévinas and hisfriend, French philosopher and artist Maurice Blanchot, to explore the notion ofart as alterity and the educational and pedagogical implications such a notion canbring about. Taking into account the primacy and significance attributed to radicalalterity by Lévinas and the link between art and the human face established byBlanchot, I argue that a notion of art as alterity implies a much more essential rolefor art in education.

Lévinas’s Notion of Radical Alterity and Art

In Lévinas’s account of human subjectivity, the radical alterity of the Other iswhat interrupts and suspends the formation of an egoistic “I” and reenters in theformation of an open subjectivity that is led by the beyond in the never-endingprocess of transformation.17 According to Lévinas, the egoistic “I” is premisedon its comprehension and assimilation of all others and on taking the world ashis project.18 But the radical Otherness of the face cannot be comprehended orassimilated into the I, and thus disrupts its conquering. Rather than enclosingitself in its own essence and monologue, the subject is forced open by thecall from the Other. Ethics is achieved in this formation of open subjectivity,in the subject’s responsibility for the Other’s suffering. Lévinas’s account ofhuman subjectivity underscores its openness, transformation, and spirituality, anemphasis that challenges the modern notion of an autonomous, self-masteredsubject.

Lévinas’s notion of radical alterity also entails a notion of human communitythat is genuinely plural, where the human relation is “without a relation,” arelation of absolute separation. The radical alterity of the Other ensures that hecannot be part of a fusion, but will always remain singular in a community. AsLévinas sees it, in Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger, the social idealhas always been conceived as fusion and communion, an ideal that emphasizesthe solidarity and sameness of the parties. But “a Lévinasian vision of communitywould be ‘a collectivity that is not a communion,’ … a community unworkedthrough the irreducibility of plurality.”19

Gert Biesta has pointed out that Lévinas’s understanding of human subjectivitymakes possible an education that is genuinely subject-making because, accordingto Lévinas, the subject is no longer an unchangeable norm that makes all edu-cation a process of normalization. When students encounter radical Otherness inschools and are deeply affected by it, their subjectivity is interrupted and becomesopen, transformative, and ethical. Education can help provide such opportunities

17. For a more detailed explication of Lévinas’s account of subjectivity, see Guoping Zhao, “Levinas andthe Mission of Education,” Educational Theory 62, no. 6 (2012): 659–675.

18. Because the masculine pronoun is used exclusively in the works by Lévinas and Blanchot that I drawon in my analysis, I retain the masculine throughout this article.

19. Critchley, “Il y a — Holding Lévinas’s Hand to Blanchot’s Fire,” 110.


for interruption.20 As Lévinas indicates, the essence of teaching is precisely inter-ruption — “the placing in me of the idea of infinity.”21 Lévinas writes in Totalityand Infinity,

Teaching is a discourse in which the master can bring to the student what the student doesnot yet know. It does not operate as maieutics, but continues the placing in me of the idea ofinfinity. The idea of infinity implies a soul capable of containing more than it can draw fromitself. It designates an interior being that is capable of a relation with the exterior, and doesnot take its own interiority for the totality of being. (TI, 180)

Thus teaching, and education in general, consists of the Other’s encounters andconfrontation with the self. It guides the self to go beyond, to break its interiorityand to live in ethics and spirituality. Education is responsible for providing studentswith the access and opportunity for such encounter and confrontation. But how caneducation provide such access? Does art play a role?

Interestingly, Lévinas’s answer to the last question is an astonishing “no.”For Lévinas, alterity is particularly embodied in the face of the other person,the autrui. It is in the direct encounter with the face of the other person thatthe I is forced to open and to move toward infinity. As Jill Robbins comments,“The autosignification and auto-attendance of facial expression are how theface decisively calls upon me, obligating me, opening the dimension of theethical.”22 In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas states that in the face where “the beingthat expresses himself personally attends the work of expression” (TI, 227), thetranscendence of the Other is concretely realized.

Not only does art fail to embody alterity, art is also not the means of expressionand communication between singular parties. In Lévinas’s account, to maintainthe absolute separation between the self and the Other, where the alterity of theOther is preserved, and to maintain the “radical asymmetry between parties” (AT,66), the only means of expression and communication are through responsibilityand discourse. “Discourse is … an original relation with exterior being” (TI,66). Here discourse is understood as “interlocution, as interpellation, in whichethics [exists] in its most originary sense” (AT, 66). It is expression and speechbetween a person and another person. “To present oneself by signifying is tospeak,” Lévinas maintains (TI, 66). In speech and in expression, there is the senseof “straightforwardness” and “sincerity” (TI, 202). The expression and speaking“surmounts and … calls me to responsibility, even commanding me, ‘thou shaltnot kill’” (AT, 66). The link between expression and responsibility is “the ethicalcondition or essence of language” (TI, 200).

20. Gert Biesta, “Education After the Death of the Subject: Levinas and the Pedagogy of Interruption,”in The Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education, ed. Zeus Leonardo (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers,2010).

21. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pitts-burgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 180. This work will be cited in the text as TI for all subsequentreferences.

22. Jill Robbins, “Aesthetic Totality and Ethical Infinity: Lévinas on Art,” L’Esprit Créateur 35, no. 3(1995): 69. This work will be cited in the text as AT for all subsequent references.


Rather than providing direct access to the face of the Other, art, Lévinas main-tains, substitutes its image for the Other. Lévinas writes, “the most elementaryprocedure of art consists in substitution for the object its image,” and this substi-tution “neutralizes” the self’s “living” and “real” relationship with that object.23

The direct and personal encounter of the self and the Other is lost. In contrastwith the transcendence of the expression of the face, art production “attests theauthor of the work in his absence, as a plastic form” (TI, 227). An image relatesto its object through resemblance, representing “veracity and deceit” (TI, 202) and“overwhelming” sincerity and straightforwardness (LR, 131). “[A]rtwork remainsessentially disengaged,” Lévinas claims (LR, 131). As Robbins notes, in Lévinas’sview, such substitution of an image for its object is “an utter evasion, an abdica-tion of responsibility, indeed an elision of the ethical dimension of experience”(AT, 73). What arises from the absence of the face of the Other in art is “its owncaricature, its picturesqueness” (LR, 135). The image attempts to reduce the faceto “a singular instance of a concept,” a fixed form “as the focus of the gaze” (TI, 68and 66). Lévinas insists that the face can never be reduced to its plastic image, andit will always exceed the form: “Expression, or the face, overflows images, whichare always immanent to my thought” (TI, 297). But in art, in the production of theOther, the process of imaging a face only makes a “frozen, petrified … mask” inwhich “the other’s transcendence is … blocked, stopped, turned into immanence”(AT, 73 and 67).

Such substitution also leads to the replacement of the nontotalizing relationto the face of the Other by participation, where the alterity is lost and the selfand the Other are totalized in one system. For Lévinas, ethics is the “break fromparticipation” (TI, 58), as if the I is separated from the transcendent God in religion,but art leads to participation in rhythm. It transports the interlocutors of ethicaldiscourse into “incantation,” “turning ‘prayer’ … into sacred rite and liturgy” (AT,69). According to Lévinas, all art, all images, have a musical element, the rhythm,in which “the subject is caught up and carried away by it. The subject is part ofits own representation … no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage fromoneself to anonymity” (LR, 132–133, emphasis in original). Lévinas claims that“this is the captivation or incantation of poetry and music” (LR, 133).

Such a sweeping dismissal of art from the realm of ethics and subjectivity is,apparently, influenced by Plato’s criticism of mimesis and rejection of poetry in theRepublic. As John Llewelyn suggests, Lévinas’s assertions that art is “disengaged,”without “utility,” “outside ‘being in the world’” can also be understood andsituated “within a tradition of the thinking of the aesthetic in Kant and Heidegger”(AT, 72). But above all, I would argue, his rejection of the work of art is an attemptto safeguard the ethical root of human subjectivity. For Lévinas, only when theradical alterity is embodied in the personal face will the responsibility of the selffor the Other lead to goodness in the human subject. When the personal face is

23. Emmanuel Lévinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1989),132. This work will be cited in the text as LR for all subsequent references.


replaced by a neutral nothingness, ethics in the traditional sense is difficult toachieve. His description of art is also unnecessarily narrow: it does not attend to theexperience of art that confronts and interrupts, but only to that which entertainsand decorates, acculturates and captivates.

Thus while Lévinas’s account highlights the significance and primacy ofradical alterity, it excludes art from the arena of alterity. If indeed art is to bereconceptualized as providing access to alterity, to fully benefit from Lévinas’saccount of alterity and its potential contributions to education, we have toovercome Lévinas’s claims regarding the nonethical nature of art. It is here thatthe philosophy of Maurice Blanchot, Lévinas’s contemporary, friend, and a fellowFrench philosopher and artist, can be helpful. Blanchot insists that, contrary toLévinas’s claim, art provides precisely the radical alterity that disrupts our beingand leads us to ethics.

Art as the Outside and Alterity in Blanchot

Blanchot studied philosophy with Lévinas at the University of Strasbourg andshared Lévinas’s early enthusiasm for Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Afterthe publication of Lévinas’s Totality and Infinity, Blanchot allows an interlocutorin one of his plays to claim that this book has enacted “a new departure inphilosophy and a leap that it, and we ourselves, were urged to accomplish.”24

Both Lévinas’s and Blanchot’s notion of alterity, the possibility of encounter withthe aspect of experience that is irreducible to the self and to ideas, is enabled bytheir critique of Heidegger’s Being-towards-death that, according to their view,ultimately allows the achievement of an enclosed selfhood and autonomy.25 ForLévinas and Blanchot, death is not one’s own death — that is, it is not a possibilityof the self — but it is beyond grasp and is the absolute Other or Outside to theself.26 Like Lévinas, Blanchot signifies the importance of radical alterity, which,like death or dying, is “absolute, unanticipatable,” and “non-adequate to the idea”(TI, 34). In his discussion of the “relation of the third kind” in The InfiniteConversation, Blanchot articulates a similar relation to the Other:

I have in this relation with man a relation with what is radically out of my reach; and thisrelation measures the very extent of the Outside.… True strangeness, if it comes to me fromman, comes to me from this Other that man would be.… He is what comes to me as speechwhen to speak is not to see, … the third kind affirming a relation without unity, withoutequality.27

In this relation, “I do not address you” — since in my response to you I amalready cast out of myself, out of my being. Similar to Lévinas, Blanchot believesthat the “I,” when confronted by the Other, will no longer be able to be. My

24. Blanchot, cited in Iyer, “The Sphinx’s Gaze,” 190.

25. Critchley, “Il y a — Holding Lévinas’s Hand to Blanchot’s Fire.”

26. Lévinas calls it “an absolute, unanticipatable alterity, as one goes forth unto death” (TI, 34).

27. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993), 69. This work will be cited in the text as IC for all subsequent references.


freedom and my sovereignty are contested. As Lars Iyer observes, “The presence ofthe Other does not merely hollow out a response in my ‘I,’ leaving my subjectivityintact, but inserts itself, as it were, into the heart of my self-sufficiency.”28

Blanchot adds that the Other, or autrui, when speaking to me, also “does not speakto me as a self” (IC, 69). Between us is this “fissure,” this “inordinate distance (adistance beyond measure) that is the infinite movement of dying” (IC, 69 and 72).Both Blanchot and Lévinas see the destitution and the defenselessness of the faceas what confronts me and demands that my power to assimilate be taken away.

Unlike Lévinas, however, Blanchot’s Other is not particularly embodied in apersonal face, the autrui. In fact, the experience of alterity in Blanchot is the autre,strictly impersonal and neutral. Coming from the realization of the radical alterityof death as ungraspable, Blanchot’s Otherness is beyond the personal He, or properto me. It is a neutral absence of being; it is “man without horizon,” “being withoutbeing” (IC, 69), obscure and empty. In response to Lévinas’s insistence that radicalalterity comes from the personal Other, Blanchot argues, “Every notion of alterityalready implies man as the other, and not the inverse. Only, it follows from thisthat the Other man who is “autrui” also risks being always Other than man, closeto what cannot be close to me: close to death, close to the night” (IC, 72).

Like death and night, if the Other is the absolute alterity, he is already otherthan man, and thus cannot be just the personal He. He is embedded in somethingbroader, something obscure and mysterious, like the Outside. For Blanchot, it isthis impersonal, neutral Other as Outside that leads to infinity and ethics. In therelation between me and the Other, we are the Other to each other, and we bothbecome neutral and impersonal. Blanchot writes in The Infinite Conversation,

The Other who looms up before me — outside my horizon and as one coming from afar —is for himself nothing but a self who would like to be heard by the Other, be received by theOther and stand in my presence, as if I were the Other and because I am nothing other thanthe Other: the unidentifiable, the “I”-less, the nameless, the presence of the inaccessible. (IC,70)

However, the Other’s being neutral and impersonal does not make him unableto disrupt my being and demand responsibility on my part. Blanchot states,

Let us keep in mind that autrui is a name that is essentially neutral and that, far from relievingus of all responsibility of attending to the neutral, it reminds us that we must, in the presenceof the other who comes to us as Autrui, respond to the depth of strangeness, of inertia, ofirregularity and idleness to which we open when we seek to receive the speech of the Outside.(IC, 72)

The neutral Other, simply by being the absolute alterity, will stop and blockour immanent power to identify, to comprehend, and to assimilate. We areessentially inadequate in this neutral relation where “the one to the other is doublydissymmetrical” (IC, 73).

While Lévinas sees art as an insignificant caricature that blocks the transcen-dence of the Other, Blanchot sees it as that which leads us to the experience of

28. Iyer, “The Sphinx’s Gaze,” 198.


absolute alterity and infinity. Blanchot claims that “language, the experience oflanguage — writing — is what leads us to sense a relation entirely other, a rela-tion of the third kind” (IC, 73). For Blanchot, the world presents itself to us asbeing, but literature and art give themselves as nonbeing. Literature takes placeas a negation of being; thus it provides the artist direct contact with the pro-found other-than-being, the “beyond and beneath being itself.”29 Blanchot declaresthat “through writing, the mark of the absolutely non-identical in the Other …announce[s] itself” (IC, 71). In The Space of Literature, Blanchot writes, “Art —as image, as words, and as rhythm — indicates the menacing proximity of a vagueand vacant outside, a neutral existence, nil and limitless; art points into a sordidabsence, a suffocating condensation where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself asnothingness.”30

As in the relation with the Other, in art the artist loses his power and capacityas an “I” to speak, to have control of what is going to emerge — or, to useIyer’s words, “I lose my capacity to express myself freely and spontaneously inlanguage.”31 The work becomes my Other, and my ego and consciousness, alongwith my freedom and autonomy, are contested. The “I” becomes the “absencefrom being,” separated from myself, and I am “no longer either my presence or myreality.”32 Blanchot believes that the written work is always “an extraordinary,unforeseeable innovation — such that it is impossible for me to conceive whatit is capable of being without writing it.” Thus “no matter how consciously [thework of art was] produced,” in the face of the work “I shall be unable to remainthe same,” because it has become “something other,” something that I have nocontrol over and that in the face of which “I become other,” too.33

For Blanchot, this loss of the very capacity to identify and gather into beingreveals “a movement from the ‘I’ to the ‘he,’ from the ‘I’ who can put death to work[to] the presubjectivated, depropriated space of dying.”34 The “I,” in Blanchot’swords, “becomes the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges.”35

For Blanchot, in art, we experience the same pre-ego, pre-conscious existencefrom which Lévinas draws his open subjectivity. In such existence, we are deeplyimmersed in the universal nonbeing, obscure and ambiguous; it is a stage in ourmovement toward radical and absolute alterity, infinity.

29. Kevin Hart, “Introduction,” in Clandestine Encounter: Philosophy in the Narratives of MauriceBlanchot, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 12.

30. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1982), 242–243.


32. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 324.

33. Ibid., 314.


35. Blanchot, quoted in Iyer, “The Sphinx’s Gaze,” 196–197.


Here the language of literature is a direct response to the experience andcommand of the Other, the Outside. Lévinas has claimed that only discourseand speech belong to the realm of transcendence and infinity, and art and imagesbelong to the realm of “the said,” the fixed form, but Blanchot argues that thedifference between common language and literary language lies precisely in thefact that while common language refers back to the true being, the “said,” andrefers with certainty to presence, literary language refers only to nothingness,negating what it refers to, and forces the object outside of itself. Literary languageis perpetually made of “uneasiness” and “contradictions.”36 When the wordis written, it becomes an “obscure power” that makes things “really presentoutside of themselves.”37 Lévinas’s accusation is indeed true — in the imageof art, the object is absent — but for Blanchot, the object is only forced intosomething outside of itself; “in the universal anonymity,” its radical alterityremains.38

Thus I am “cast out of myself” in front of my work — the Other — andlanguage is my response, also my guide, to the one I have no control over —the one that befalls the “I.” From this perspective, art is that which opens thedoor to the impossibility of death, to the Outside, and to the radical alterity fromwhich Lévinas’s Totality and Infinity is born. I would add that in appreciating awork of art, the “I” goes into a similar process of negation. The infinite process ofcomprehension indicates that I am never in full grasp of its being and my freedomand sovereignty are contested. It is through the Other and the Outside that I amled to the beyond.

In Blanchot’s description of the experience of art, art appears as not justinstrumental and decorative, along the lines of those works governments have longput to use: the “poet at inaugurations,” the “military music” that stirs “hatred,solidarity, or fear,”39 the art that even the Nazi regime loves and that Lévinas seesas enchanting and captivating. Blanchot is describing particularly the experienceof art that opens the “space of the abysmal,” like in tragedy,40 or art that is“rebellious, aggressive, difficult, and hard to digest.”41 This is the kind of art thatappears as incompatible and incomprehensible, as much good art appears at firstand continues to appear. “Art is … a criticism of the world as it is and a vision ofthe world as it might be,” and it “does not have to speak to a consensus” of the

36. Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” 325.

37. Ibid., 328 (emphasis in original).

38. Ibid., 328.

39. Leon Botstein, “What Role for the Arts?” in A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and theUnfinished Conversation, eds. William Ayers and Janet L. Miller (New York: Teachers College Press,1998), 65.

40. Travis Anderson, “Drawing Upon Lévinas to Sketch Out a Heterotopic Poetics of Art and Tragedy,”Research in Phenomenology 24, no. 1 (1994): 70.

41. Botstein, “What Role for the Arts?,” 66.


world.42 Art does not just acculturate and integrate; it also confronts and interrupts,as radical alterity.

The difference between Lévinas’s and Blanchot’s views on literature and artthus lies in their understanding of the nature of the Other; it is the differencebetween the personal and the impersonal, autrui and autre. It seems that Blan-chot’s Other, while not negating the personal and the facial, expands it andextends it to the vast realm of universal obscurity, which is not within the ter-ritory of a conscious agent, beyond the project of the formed subject “I.” Alter-ity in Blanchot implies not just the personal God, but also the universe, theunimaginable, the infinite, and the transcendent, which are introduced precisely bygood art.

In fact, some have argued that Lévinas himself is not able to avoid the expe-rience of the impersonal, neutral, but ever-returning, nonbeing world. Critchleysuggests that Lévinas’s notion of the il y a, “there is,” expresses such an experi-ence. For Lévinas, “there is,” or il y a, is the stage that keeps coming back to disruptthe complacence of being. However, it is also the stage that has to be overcome forthe self to emerge in responsibility to the Other. Open subjectivity and ethics riseabove such experience.43 Could, then, Lévinas’s dismissal of art and literature beunderstood as part of his struggle to overcome the ever-encroaching ambiguity andneutrality for ethics?

Regardless, what is significant here is that Blanchot’s reconstruction of thenotion of Otherness/alterity and his assertion that art provides access to alterityand to ethics allow us to reconsider the role of art in education. I argue that it is thetotalizing tendency in Western philosophy, as expressed in its single-minded focuson an ego-like, agent-like subject, that has been at the root of modern tragedies thathave damaged both the self and the Other. If Lévinas is right that it is the totalizingtendency that has stopped the “movement that leaves a world … intimate andfamiliar … and goes towards the stranger, toward a beyond” and has led to theconquering and absorbing of the Other into the self, then the Other, the “stranger,”and the “beyond” have the power to break the enclosed totality, not necessarily thepersonal face. From this perspective, a movement toward radical alterity, personalor impersonal, is a movement of ethics.

The Role of Art in Education

With Lévinas’s idea of the primacy of radical alterity that breaks the totalityof our being, enables self-transformation and ethics, and ensures community as atotality of singularities, and with Blanchot’s expansion of radical alterity to the vastrealm of unimaginable Otherness brought in by art, the role of art in education hasto be reconsidered and greatly expanded. If art as alterity is so essential to humansubjectivity and to human society, and if education is conceived “as a process of

42. Stanford University News Service, “Panelists Discuss Role of Art in Changing Society,” September30, 1991, http://news.stanford.edu/pr/91/910930Arc1146.html.

43. Critchley, “Il y a — Holding Lévinas’s Hand to Blanchot’s Fire.”


human growth and formation,”44 art as alterity is essential to education. Educationwould become, as Lévinas argued, the Other’s encounter and confrontation withthe self, and art is to play the essential role of providing access to the Other. Artprovides the opportunities for students to encounter the radical Otherness that isunknown in their frame of mind, that sits uncomfortably with their presumptions,and that interrupts the complacency and adequacy of their being and calls for open-ness and response; they learn and grow, and they “become” in such openness andin their responses. Art as alterity takes students beyond where they are and whatthey have, and teaches them to appreciate and respect difference and diversity —in this sense, art is an essential part of moral and ethical education. The essen-tial role of art in education lies in its promotion of students’ self-formation andtransformation (the educational mission of subjectification) and in its promotion ofdemocracy as genuine plurality. Rather than mere entertainment or decoration —which are the first things to go when there are budget cuts or test score pressures —art as alterity has to be more seriously engaged and more fully integrated into thewhole educational process.

Apparently, art as alterity particularly indicates the kind of art that is “ontolog-ically difficult,” as George Steiner terms it, which means that it does not lend itselfto easy agreement or provide an intelligible link between the art and its “essence”or meaning.45 Or, to use a different formulation, this kind of art is Roland Barthes’s“the text of bliss” that “unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychologicalassumptions” and brings something unknown and senseless.46 Or, on anotheraccount, it is what Richard Rorty calls “live metaphors”47 that “do not let them-selves be translated into an easily accessible idea or theme.”48 One example ofsuch art is suggested by Peter Roberts, who argues that Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notesfrom Underground teaches us the “limits of reason,” an educationally significantlesson. Roberts comments that “Dostoevsky’s work unsettles us as reasoningbeings.”49 The “inner disharmony” and “dividedness” of the characters, alongwith the difficult moral dilemmas central to the story, cannot be fully appreciatedby reason: “We need to give characters their due, let events unfold, complete thestory, and then wait — experiencing not just the deliberative process of reflectionand the understanding this brings but also a less definite ‘feeling’ for the work… [so that it will] live with us for many years after we have first encountered[it].”50 René Arcilla, drawing on Clement Greenberg and T. J. Clark, also claims

44. Roberts, “Education and the Limits of Reason,” 210.

45. George Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 40.

46. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975),14.

47. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),18.

48. Ruitenberg, “Learning to Live with Art,”456. See Ruitenberg’s discussion of the “art-that-is-other.”

49. Roberts, “Education and the Limits of Reason,” 217 (emphasis in original).

50. Ibid.


that modernist art, in stressing the medium, is another example of art that doesnot provide a coherent meaning, a full utterance, but brings in “strangerhood”and “negation.”51 Arcilla suggests that pre-modernist art has been ruled by theproject of “representing and communicating familiar subject matter”; modernart, in contrast, is characterized by purposeful negation of such representation,“signaled by the appearance of features that float free of this project, provoking inus a basic perplexity” (MPR, 30). A modernist painting, for example, “may seemon cursory glance to be about the commonplace world” but in an “extremelydistorted or puzzling fashion” (MPR, 31), like Picasso’s works often are. Forviewers, the easy comprehension of the represented world and experience — the“utterance” (MPR, 32) — is outside their grasp, and they are forced to face thedisrupting, incomplete, “interminable” (MPR, 33), and decomposed medium, thelines and the elements that are only self-representing and suggestive. The mediuminvites the viewers to engage in a never-ending struggle while the art remainsimpossible to fully take in and “conquer,” but becomes alive again in every newencounter.

Needless to say, these are difficult encounters, and that’s why modernist artis often seen as elitist, “irrelevant to the person on the street” (MPR, 33). Butprecisely because they are difficult, we have to encourage students to engage withthem and attempt to respond to them, because the engagement exerts significantimpact on us, on who we are and who we will come to be. In fact, not only artbut also nature — “the fractal geometry of an unfurled fiddlehead or the sight ofKilimanjaro rising off the plain”52 — can signify the potential of such an encounterof the self with radical alterity. The personal face and the elements of difficult artand overwhelming nature that evade our grasp, unsettle our reason, and challengeour consciousness, either by their complex or foreign content or by their medium,53

if we allow ourselves to be open to them, force us to reconnect to our pre-ego,pre-conscious existence. We encounter such alterity without knowing what we areencountering. We cannot readily acquire and carry away its meaning or essence,and thus we remain disrupted and unfree in front of it. We cannot be in the senseof a complacent and autonomous being. As Claudia Ruitenberg notes, “I cannotenter the work of art, become part of it, and I cannot make the work of art becomepart of me.”54 Art as alterity is the abysmal, the obscure, the out-of-control, thenothingness, and the unimaginable; it is also the infinite and the transcendent, asBlanchot describes; it shatters our world and then renews it. Art as alterity remainsat some distance from us, and nevertheless exerts its impact on us, calling us to

51. René V. Arcilla, Mediumism: A Philosophical Reconstruction of Modernism for Existential Learning(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 32. This work will be cited in the text as MPR forall subsequent references.

52. Chris Higgins, letter to author, January 27, 2014. I would like to thank the editor of EducationalTheory, Chris Higgins, for his insightful suggestion that the same argument applies to nature.

53. Again, I would like to thank Chris Higgins for his insightful questions.

54. Ruitenberg, “Learning to Live with Art,” 457.


respond, affecting us, leaving us open and transformed. Such art as alterity is thusessential for growing and learning students.

Art as alterity also teaches us to appreciate differences and diversity, and topromote schools as the site of ethics. As Leon Botstein argues, if society allowsfree art without censorship, society will be forced to welcome extreme differences.Art as alterity can teach us to suspend our tendency to judge, dismiss, or subjugatethe incompatible, and to be open, tolerant, and welcoming to all that is different,strange, and incomprehensible. In a society and in education, Botstein suggests,when free and uncensored art is protected, “it is itself an ethical good.” Such asociety “has potentially more of an ethical future than one that does not” protectfree and uncensored art.55 Art as alterity teaches us to protect “extreme dissent,the dissent of the marginal individual to whom nobody wants to listen. Even, orespecially, dissent that seems outrageous, irrelevant, and incomprehensible.”56

In “a classroom full of racial, gender, class, ideological, and economic strife,hostility, suspicion and everything else, the arts create something that forcessome conversation that cannot be totally reduced into the preexisting labels andcategories of expected discourse.”57 Art as alterity forces students to appreciate,respect, and respond to those who are different, even without understandingand a shared perspective. It helps students encounter their diverse peers withresponsibility and with an ethical attitude and become citizens of a democracy thatis built on genuine plurality. Such understanding of the nature of art and its rolein education has not been sufficiently appreciated in the United States. Lévinas’sand Blanchot’s notions of art and alterity help us reconsider and expand the role ofart in education and in democracy.

Pedagogical Implications

If we accept the notion of art as alterity and acknowledge the essential role ofart in education, then what are the pedagogical implications inside and outsideof classrooms? The first implication is that art, new art, art that evades easyexplanations, should be introduced in education. We have stayed away from“difficult” art for a long time and have mostly allowed only “safe” art — thatis, easy art, sweet art, art with clear and ready answers, and art with practical orcraft utility — in the curriculum. The second implication is that we should bemore seriously committed to and engaged with art. Rather than circumscribingart in “arts education,” we need to integrate art to a greater extent in schoolcurricula and extracurricular activities, and such integration should not be limitedto superficial and instrumental purposes. Art, particularly difficult art that canexert “great impact or influence for good or ill on human life or character,”58 must

55. Botstein, “What Role for the Arts?” 69.

56. Ibid., 66.

57. Ibid., 67.

58. Carr, “Dangerous Knowledge,” 3.


be included, talked about, and discussed among students and teachers throughoutstudents’ school lives.

Third, in discussing art inside and outside classrooms, teachers need to guardagainst prescribing explanations and interpretations of particular artworks. AsRuitenberg suggests,

A teacher does not establish a focus for listening to, looking at, or reading the work. Studentsare given the freedom — and responsibility — to “be with” the work. Guidance and structuremay be required later on for learning more about the work and for reflecting upon it, but theseactivities should not shape and limit the actual perception of the work.59

In students’ encounters with difficult art, rather than supplying them with pre-determined answers, our job is to expose students to uneasy and uncomfortablestrangeness, to allow them to be interrupted, confused, even lost. In order for newmeanings to emerge, we have to leave open the possibility and threat of no mean-ing.

Introducing art as alterity in education, therefore, involves a certain risk.Education is no longer simply knowledge transmission and teachers guidingstudents on a known, safe path to a predetermined destination. The end isunknown and the path is often untraveled. In encouraging students to venture intothe unknown and the difficult, we also venture into a risky educational endeavorin which the result is unpredictable. But precisely because it is risky, it is agenuine educational endeavor. Instead of education being mere normalization andsocialization, we engage in the process of subjectification,60 and we allow studentsthe freedom to emerge as unique, singular beings.

Needless to say, introducing students to the new, the unknown, and thedifficult may be problematic, especially since students are at the tender age ofself-formation. Some may argue that “when most K–16 students are engaged invarious ways at identity formation, the shattering of worlds and invitations to thestrange and incomprehensible require further consideration and justification.”61 Iargue that students may be much stronger and more open to challenges than wethought. It is the already formed self and identity that is afraid of challenges andchanges. It is we adults who are often confined by preexisting labels and categories,assumptions and perspectives. Young minds and selves, as tender as they are,are much more flexible and open to being affected and reformed. Encounteringthe new and being taken beyond constitutes precisely what is essential to theirself-formation. In this sense, art as alterity is more important for students who arestill becoming, so they can be ever renewed and transformed, and that is the beautyand hope of education.

59. Ruitenberg, “Learning to Live with Art,” 458.

60. Biesta, “Education After the Death of the Subject.”

61. I thank one of Educational Theory’s anonymous reviewers for raising this question.

Guoping Zhao (2014). Art as Alterity in Education. Educational Theory. 64 (3): 245-259..

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