Otherness

The notion of Otherness—for all its familiarity and slipperiness—has become so relevant in our era of rapid political polarization that a fresh and interdisciplinary examination of its roots seems in order. This roundtable will bring together philosophers, psychoanalysts, social theorists and historians to trace its origins and significance at multiple levels. 

What do we talk about when we talk about Otherness? When did the concept first appear in Western discourse?  How did “Othering” become a verb? Why is xenophobia surging across the Western world again?

For phenomenologists—and infancy researchers–the awareness of other minds is thought to be a normative, even constitutive aspect of our very capacity for what Husserl termed, “transcendental subjectivity”: Infants become aware that objects and persons in the world are really there because of an implicit sense that they are available—or could be–to other experiencing subjects in a shared social world. And yet the capacity to maintain the sense of the other as a like-minded subject becomes a never-ending struggle—both in early infancy, and, as Hegel intimated, in the broad historical sense: We seem to live with the perennial possibility of either erasing the Other as subject—or being erased by the Other in turn. Can attending to the developmental and historical roots of Otherness help us understand—and even transcend the sort of Master-Slave dilemma that has so marked our current political moment—where, as the psychoanalyst/social theorist Jessica Benjamin puts it, “only one can live”?