Other, The

Concern for the other/Other, which can also be regarded as concern for difference, is a leading motif in postfoundational thought. Concern for the other/Other has a decidedly ethical dimension and opens up spaces for political activism in pursuit of social justice. The “other/Other” complex signals, however, that the concern for difference is not a singular project; within the diverse theoretical landscape of postfoundational thought, concerns address different differences. Following the logic of postfoundational thought, which utterly opposes totalization, the different differences cannot and should not be dialectically resolved. Such a resolution would deprive difference—the other/Other—of the honor of its name.

The use or the lack of upper case to designate the other/Other is a deliberate choice to convey particular meanings. There is not an accepted convention within postfoundational thought; postfoundational scholars use the other/Other complex variously. Therefore, knowledge of individual scholars' work is necessary to determine the particular meaning to be conveyed, and individual scholars are not always consistent with the differentiation of the other/Other within their work. At the broadest level, however, the “other” usually refers to the disenfranchised other, whereas the “Other” usually refers to the radically Other, to an utter excessiveness, to an irreducible and inassimilable alterity that [Page 1069]cannot be captured in concepts or language. Theorizations of the Other often draw on notions of infinity, God, and perfection to convey the utter excessiveness of the Other, and continental postfoundational theorizations of the Other are usually haunted by the Holocaust and driven by a commitment to guard against its return. Postfoundational scholars who subscribe to the utter excessiveness of the Other, which cannot be captured in language or concepts, must address the questions of how we can know and speak of the Other.

There is tremendous variety in postfoundational theorizations of the Other, with the Other being situated in different realms, such as thought, language, and identity. In relation to the former, Theodor W. Adorno refuses the Platonic notion that concepts exhaust the things conceived. For Adorno, the Other lies outside one's conceptual apparatus; nothing fits entirely within a concept without remainder. Jacques Derrida refuses the notion of “presence,” which assumes a direct link between a word and its meaning. Derrida argues, however, that meaning is caught in chains of signification. Therefore, meaning is always differed and deferred; for Derrida, the Other is outside language. Emmanuel Levinas is concerned with the Other of identity. For Levinas, the Other, whom I face, places an ethical demand on me to refrain from dispossessing the Other of his/her otherness. Despite locating the Other in very different realms, these theorizations of the Other share a commitment to avoid the violence that reduces the Other to the Same, through the erasure, distortion, repression, or reduction of difference.

In contrast to the radical difference of the Other, the “other” usually refers to the disenfranchised other, to the other at the margins; that is, to the other on the “wrong” side of hegemonic binarisms: male/female, white/black, rich/poor, colonizer/colonized, for example. These binarisms attend social stratification, but there is no need to limit conceptions of the other to the realm of human sociality. The other could refer to animals other than humans, plants, the environment, or any of several possible recipients of human objectification. Thus, ethical concern for the other and the sites of resistance that this opens up can be used strategically to support animal rights, environmental activism, or campaigns that address injustices within the human realm.

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