ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ‘ethical’ implications of acting as an intersubjective process, experience, and event. Intersubjectivity has long been central to philosophical thought and to phenomenology in particular. The attempt to identify and act upon issues of immediate social/ethical concern provides some sense of the range and almost ubiquitous embedding of ethical issues within the what and how of making theatre. Emmanuel Levinas’s path toward establishing an ‘ethics of ethics’ is to provide his own phenomenological description of our encounter with lived experience and in doing so to provide an alternative account of intersubjectivity – the nature of this encounter with the other – that addresses what Levinas sees as the shortcomings of previous accounts. Zygmunt Bauman observes how “there are no beaten and signed tracks leading” to the place where ‘responsibility’ becomes “the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity” that Levinas himself describes both as “a utopian moment” and an “awakening”.
