‘The new walls of Europe reflect crises in Europe’s relation to itself and the world’ (Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, preface to the 2017 edition). In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as elsewhere, populism has been on the rise, and far-right discourse has altered the political landscape. Should we respond with a re-thinking of community or is ‘community’ itself part of the problem? Can an ethics of alterity (which we find in Levinas) help re-define what we understand by community? As early as 1924, in Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, Helmuth Plessner warned that ‘too much’ community, far from being positive in an egalitarian sense, can foster aggressive identity-based ‘us-versus-them’ political sentiment. Plessner, in his major work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) develops his idea of ‘positionality’ and what we might describe as looking at human beings as ‘in-between’ creatures, bordering on other animals, connected to each other socially, culturally, politically, but also separate. Plessner is searching for a new way of looking at ‘borders’ — boundaries between connectedness and separation. Almost one hundred years after Plessner’s publications, I will argue that they still offer a valuable perspective on the theme of ‘border’ and one which may help counter the aggressiveness of contemporary western discourse on borders. In my contribution, I will also draw on thinkers from the phenomenological tradition ranging from Bernhard Waldenfels, who has written of the merits of what he calls the ‘Stachel’ of the other, to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity.

中文翻译：

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危机、他者、定位：在动荡时期超越“自我和他者”的思考

“欧洲的新城墙反映了欧洲与自身和世界关系的危机”（温迪·布朗，《寨国》，《衰落的主权》，2017 年版序言）。在德国、奥地利和瑞士，与其他地方一样，民粹主义抬头，极右翼话语改变了政治格局。我们应该重新思考社区，还是“社区”本身就是问题的一部分？他异性伦理（我们在列维纳斯中发现）是否有助于重新定义我们对社区的理解？早在 1924 年，在 Grenzen der Gemeinschaft 中，Helmuth Plessner 就警告说，“过多”的社区，远非平等意义上的积极，反而会培养激进的基于身份的“我们对他们”的政治情绪。普莱斯纳在他的主要工作中，Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) 发展了他的“位置性”概念，我们可以将其描述为将人类视为“中间”生物，与其他动物接壤，在社会、文化、政治上相互联系，但也要分开。Plessner 正在寻找一种看待“边界”的新方式——连通性和分离性之间的边界。在 Plessner 发表近一百年后，我认为它们仍然提供了关于“边界”主题的有价值的观点，并且可能有助于对抗当代西方关于边界的话语的侵略性。在我的贡献中，我还将借鉴现象学传统中的思想家，从伯恩哈德·瓦尔登费尔斯（Bernhard Waldenfels）到伊曼纽尔·列维纳斯（Emmanuel Levinas）的他者伦理学，他写了他所谓的“他者”的优点。