ABSTRACT
Leaving, at the end of the last chapter, the aesthetic ‘alongside’ the world is by no means to deny it worldly status, on the contrary, it is, rather, the manner in which, as Luhmann describes it, art is a ‘world within the world’, that is the central concern here. Art is ‘alongside’ rather than inside because, as Levinas, insists (following Rosenzweig) it does not enter into dialogue with the world but is silent: ‘all the arts, even the sonorous ones create silence’. 1 Rather than staying within the aesthetic however, the following reflections will consider some of the phenomenological and hermeneutical aspects of this silence (the silence of the other) as a way of providing a context for an engagement with the dissymmetrical and asymmetrical models of teaching proposed by Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas respectively. On completion of this an attempt will then be made to reconnect (or not) such pedagogies of exteriority or alterity, to an originary aesthetics of teaching that renders silence productive.
