"love does violence to totality, and shatters myth, but also the regulated system of exchange, everything that hides reciprocity. 'Escaping totality' thus means two things for me: either regressing into the chaos of undifferentiated violence or taking a leap into the harmonious community of 'others as others.' It means that each must stop being a simple link in the chain, a part of the whole, a soldier in an army. We can feel that Levinas was trying to go beyond the Same, beyond the ontology that makes individuals interchangeable, to find the Other. Going beyond the Same would require first a theory of the duel."
René Girard, "The Duel and the Sacred" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 99.
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