" 'The Poetics of Proximity' in Mahmud Darwish's Athar Al-Farashah" This study is intended to explore Mahmud Darwish's Athar Al-Farashah (The Butterfly Effect) as an embodiment of relational proximity to the other. Such proximity functions as an anti-dote to Darwish's anxiety about absence/death and it represents the fruition of his poetic vision. Focusing initially on the significance of the title, the study will investigate the nuances of the word "athar" in Arabic (both as effect and trace) as modes of proximity. It will unravel the semiotics of the "butterfly" as representative of poetic sensibility. To achieve this task, the study relies mainly on the philosophical views of Emmanuel Levinas which sound congenial to those of Darwish. According to Levinas, poetry is "the proximity of things." In this sense, poetry is a "caress" which functions as a mode of transcendence in the here-and-now. Levinas's other-oriented thought emphasizes the search for what things are "in themselves, in their radical otherness," and as "traces of the infinite" (Collected Papers 118-19). Such perspective enables us to conceive the aesthetical as an approximation of the ethical in this work. Darwish's concept of alterity encompasses mainly another human being--a neighbor, a lovely woman, the "enemy," or the reader. However, it often seeks abstract terms for alterity in the natural world--the sky, the sea, a river, a tree, or a stone. Such proximity to things bestows a sense of "dwelling" on earth that belies the impending threat of absence. The poet's endeavor to leave behind him a "trace" is perceived as an ethical responsibility to the other. Through such agency, the limitations imposed on the poetic voice by absence are transcended by the permanent presence of the trace/effect of proximity to the other. This conclusion is in harmony with the fact that Darwish's late work emphasizes the humanizing, yet fragile, role of the poetic self that disseminates itself in the process of seeking correspondence to the whole world. For me, the implicit significance of this study perhaps lies in bringing together a Palestinian poet and a Jewish philosopher who shared a common ethical/aesthetical vision.