All that cannot occur by the decision and the deed of a demiurge but thanks to the acknowledging and letting be that which exists and shows its will to be, notably through a desire for another living being which is naturally different. In this desire, two temporalities intervene, the one of nature and the one of culture, and fulfilling our desire compels us to take the two into account in order to elaborate a temporality suitable for the relationship between living beings.
The temporality of nature is slow, continuous, related to the living beings. The cultural temporality can evolve through leaps, gulfs, and so on, because it lacks a unique reference which takes root in reality; hence, various temporal elaborations exist which can collapse. Cultural temporality can also go round in circles—as an eternal return of the same— without any possible issue except destruction. Opening to a living being different from oneself is that which can reopen a circularity resulting from sameness. Letting the other disconcert us is a way of succeeding in combining natural and cultural becoming without any leap being necessary. The other both attracts us outside of us and makes us move back, especially to and within ourselves.
Taking into account the otherness of the other presupposes that we enter into another temporality, a temporality in which neither Time nor Being exist. Indeed, time and being are then constantly woven by both nature and culture, sameness and difference, oneself and the other without they can ever amount to a unique entity.
Perhaps, in this connection, what Heidegger affirms about the work of the hand could be questioned. According to him « every work of the hand is carried out by thinking » (op.cit., p. 90; p. 16). But Heidegger little wonders about the contribution that the hand itself makes to thinking, in a sort of dialectical process between what belongs to the body and what to the mind, what belongs to our physical part and what to our spiritual part. Apparently he does not perceive that touching the hand of the other can reopen the circle in which thought and language were enclosed. He does not glimpse how touching in this way another thought