Our "Other" Vocation

Levinas conceives of our relationship to others in terms of the word "substitution." In my relationship with another, I somehow substitute myself for the other. But let Levinas himself explain it:

"For me, the notion of substitution is tied to the notion of responsibility. To substitute oneself does not amount to putting oneself in the place of the other in order to feel what he feels; it does not involve becoming the other nor, if he be destitute and desperate, the courage of such a trial. Rather, substitution entails bringing comfort by associating ourselves with the essential weakness and finitude of the other; it is to bear his weight while sacrificing one's interestedness and complacency-in-being, which then turn into responsibility for the other.

"In human existence, there is, as it were, interrupting or surpassing the vocation of being, another vocation: that of the other, his existing, his destiny. Here, the existential adventure of the neighbor would matter more to the I than does its own, and would thus posit the I straightaway as responsible for this alterity in its trials, as if the upsurge of the human within the economy of being overturned ontology's meaning and plot. All of the culture of the human seems to me to be oriented by this new "plot," in which the in-itself of a being persisting in its being is surpassed in the gratuity of being outside-of-oneself, for the other, in the act of sacrifice or the possibility of sacrifice, in holiness."

From "Responsibility and Substitution" in Is It Righteous To Be? at pp. 228-29.

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