Alfred Arteaga and Francisco X. Alarcón

pp. 49-71

in: Jim Keller, Writing plural worlds in contemporary U.S. poetry, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

We have to take the positive claims of our local world seriously while at the same time realizing that those claims may be radically incommensurable with regard to other worlds. The tasks of our thinking may be incommensurable with regard to the tasks of other types of thinking, and there is no (phenomenological, poetic, or other) description of those tasks that could in a non-neutral way devise (structural, formal) bridges between them. Rather, such bridges of openness have to be based on experiencing the positive content of conflictual claims. Consequently, the starting point of cross-cultural openness and a shared ethical discussion is not understanding, but misunderstanding. (Vadén 422)