Thinking the wholly other always asks about origins that could have been otherwise

Evidence

The question of the wholly other – something that cannot be thought without a feeling of vertigo – is always in fact a question about an origin that could have been wholly otherwise. A vertigo of thought, this is still a solicitation which thought finds inevitable. Yet it is a solicitation which does not come from a real outside but, rather, from the Same. ‘It is because it is’ – the formal and immediate tautology of necessity – and ‘it could be otherwise’ – the heterology of contingency: in Hegel’s thought these reveal their original and inherent complicity, shown in the two meanings of the phrase: ‘what arrives from itself/what happens on its own (ce qui arrive de soi-même)’. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1119

Categorization

• XREF: Links Anidjar’s plasticity/enmity frame — the figure of the enemy as an origin that could have been otherwise, fused same/other — to Malabou’s claim here that solicitation of the wholly other comes from the Same, not a real outside.