Other (The Other)

The idea of “the other,” sometimes capitalized as the Other, and the closely associated idea of a “primary” or “constitutive” other entered scholarly discourse through continental philosophy and is a core concept of critical theory and cultural studies, especially subfields such as race theory, sex and gender studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and animal studies. To speak of the other is to imagine an opposition between “the same”—for example, the same kind of subjectivity, person, group, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—and “the other” (kind of subjectivity, person, group, gender, sexual orientation, etc.), in which the other plays a crucial role in constituting the same. Thus, one can speak, on the one hand, of the other in general—meaning any being who confronts “us” (the same) as different—or, on the other hand, one can speak of particular, historical others: the black American as the other of the white American, the Jew and Muslim as the other of the European Christian, woman as the other of man, and so forth. As the examples in this list suggest, discourses on the other are frequently deployed to identify and critique the way in which a dominant group justifies the subordination of those designated other. Thus, “the other” is often, though not necessarily, an oppressed other.

Simone de Beauvior's analyses of woman as other and Emmanuel Lèvinas's theorization of the other as one who precedes me and calls me into being through an ethical relation are two of the most influential treatments of the other. Both [Page 957]de Beauvior and Lèvinas are critiquing and developing an understanding of otherness developed by Hegel in his well-known account of the master-slave dialectic. In de Beauvior's The Second Sex, a foundational text of feminist thought, she argues that the relation of woman to man can be likened to the relationship Hegel imagines between the slave and the master in that men, like the master, understand themselves as the absolute human type, thus judging women by the standard of the male human and thereby finding them inferior.

Lèvinas takes up the theme of otherness or alterity in part to argue that ethics rather than a theory of being should stand at the beginning of philosophy. The other as theorized by Lèvinas is not simply a historical other (say, my literal neighbor) but a phenomenological structure situated in a “dimension of height” that issues the primordial expression “You shall not murder.” For Lèvinas, the “I” does not first appear and then go out into the world to encounter others, nor is there an inner self free of obligation to the other. Rather, to be a human being is already to be obligated to others.

De Beauvior's, Lèvinas's, and other reflections on the other have informed a number of influential philosophical categories, including Judith Butler's treatment of gender, Jacques Derrida's articulation of “différance,” and Julia Kristeva's theorization of “abjection.”