Throughout the history of western culture and thought, philosophy produces western subjects engendered by simultaneously including and excluding the other. The concept of the other signifies what is unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant subjectivity ...
Throughout the history of western culture and thought, philosophy produces western subjects engendered by simultaneously including and excluding the other. The concept of the other signifies what is unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant subjectivity, the opposite or negative against which an authority is defined.
We can distinguish two concepts of otherness in western metaphysics: a self-consolidating Other and an Other who is absolutely Other. The former is an imaginary other, a fantasy other through whom the self comes to know itself, and may be another version of the same. The concept of the absolute other is meant to shatter the mirror of narcissism in which the self confronts its other. In the latter case, the other can not be changed into one of the versions of the same. It may be truly and radically other.
The very concept of the other will become clear through the exploration of it in the various chapters of the book, <The Otherness of the Other and Its Discoursive Strategies>. We explore ‘the other,’ adopting the strategies of Blanchot, J. Derrida, M. Foucault, J. Deleuze, S. Zizek, G. Spivak, Haraway, etc, and try to displace the fixed Self/Other dichotomy in favor of an ethical response to oppressed people easily categorized as "others", by rereading the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Pynchon, Henry James, Doris Lessing, Le Guin, Mahaseweta Devi, J. Coetzee, and so on.