An eternity of a boot up our faces. The very opposite of Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of a surrender to the helpless visage of the other, or Buber’s relatedness to the sacred Thou. I fully agree that this is a real risk. And yet—as I have labored to show in this book and the last—it is only by dealing with these inner and relational issues of all citizens that we can have any hope of resolving the problems of modernity and reach a new island of “relative utopia” before it is too late.
