The Compelling Otherness of Sharon Todd: A Review of Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education by Sharon Todd. New York:  State University of New York Press, 2003. pp.  178

Nestled in the urban forest of Toronto, Canada, a group of academics at York University is quietly revolutionizing how we think about alterity and the unconscious in education. Vibrantly situated in this group is Sharon Todd. In her latest book, Learning From the Other, Todd embarks on a philosophical and psychoanalytic investigation to understand the conditions that allow for ethical possibilities in education. The central theme in this book pivots around the idea that “we need to consider the ways in which ethics is something other than acting on knowledge” (p. 7). For Todd, this something other than knowledge is alterity and the unconscious. It makes perfect sense, then, that Todd turns to the work of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmauel Levinas and the notion of the unconscious to explore this topic. Although not prevalent in psychoanalytic writing, the ideas of Levinas address and enhance many concepts that are the foundation of psychoanalysis.1

Levinas, a holocaust survivor, spent his life attempting to understand alterity, the feeling or quality of being other, and “the inevitable responsibility each one of us has to the other we meet” (p. 2). Todd, expanding on Levinas's work, investigates “the conditions that make ethical attentiveness to strangeness possible in the first place” (p. 9). The term “ethics” is often used to describe what is good and bad, our moral duty and obligation; but, according to Todd, ethics are also “those moments of relationality that resist codification” (p. 9). This last definition of ethics speaks directly to the work of psychoanalysis, because analysts, too, spend time living out the moments of relationality (intrapsychically and interpersonally) that resist codification. This private experience, our otherness, when spoken out loud, is the foundation of every analytic encounter; it is where we begin learning from the other. Our private experience, our interiority, is the essence of our alterity. Or, as Todd describes