It is a summer Sunday in northern Germany. For decades, people have been practicing and transcending resistance through the Gorleben Gebet [Gorleben prayer.] Gorleben is a small village in the forest near the Elbe River, and since the mid-1970s, it has been the embodiment of resistance against the nuclear industry and its ultimate inhumanity.
A young philosopher, with her child on her lap, sits in the middle of the forest, facing the interim storage facility for sealed, highly radioactive material, and speaks about an ethic of resistance that is not directed against anything, but rather wants to see people. She describes this seeing of people as the power of touching and being touched that frees us from external determination in our otherness and allows what is possible to begin, despite the limitations. She does not pray or preach. She looks into the faces of those without whom Europe’s possibly largest nuclear waste facility would not have been built here—and reads from a conversation with Emmanuel Levinas: “The best way to encounter the other is to not even notice the color of their eyes.”1
She does not press forward when speaking, does not seek approval, but rather appears to be listening and receptive—as if probing the concepts from within so that her listeners can find themselves and their motives in them. She comes back to Levinas: “Resistance […] gleams in the face of the other, in the total nudity of their defenseless eyes, in the nakedness of the absolute openness of the transcendent. Here, there is not a relationship with a very great resistance, but with something absolutely other: the resistance of that which has no resistance—ethical resistance. The epiphany of the face awakens this possibility (…).”2
Translation Laura Liska
Image Crosses of the Gorleben Gebet. Photo: Fatelessfear, CC BY-SA 4.0
Footnotes
- Emmanuel Levinas, Ethik und Unendliches, Gespräch mit Philippe Nemo [Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo.] Translation D. Schmidt. Vienna, 2022.
- Emmanuel Levinas, Totalität und Unendlichkeit, Versuch über die Exteriorität [Totality and Infinity, An Essay on Exteriority.] Translation W. N. Krewani. Freiburg/Munich, 1987.
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