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For other uses, see Other (disambiguation).The Other or constitutive other (also referred to as othering) is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the Same.It refers, or attempts to refer to, that which is 'other' than the concept being considered.The term often means a person other than oneself, and is often capitalised.The Other is singled out as different.Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or 'other' through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is 'privileged' or favored, and the other is devalued in some way."It has been used in social science to understand the processes by which societies and groups exclude 'Others' who they want to subordinate or who do not fit into their society.Man: "Each consciousness pursues the death of the other", meaning that in seeing a separateness between you and another, a feeling of alienation is created, which you try to resolve by synthesis.The resolution is depicted in Hegel's famous parable of the master slave dialectic.Sartre also made use of such a dialectic in Being and Nothingness, when describing how the world is altered at the appearance of another person, how the world now appears to orient itself around this other person.Ethically, for Levinas, the Other is superior or prior to the self, the mere presence of the Other makes demands before one can respond by helping them or ignoring them.Derrida's points made about the impossibility of a pure presence of the Other (the Other could be other than this pure alterity first encountered), and so issues of language and representation arose.Levinas talks of the Other in terms of insomnia and wakefulness.It is an ecstasy, or exteriority toward the Other that forever remains beyond any attempt at full capture, this otherness is interminable (or infinite); even in murdering another, the otherness remains, it has not been negated or controlled.This "infiniteness" of the Other will allow Levinas to derive other aspects of philosophy and science as secondary to this ethic.The others that obsess me in the other do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature, indivudations of the human race, or chips off the old block...The others concern me from the first.My relationship with the Other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others.The "Other," as a general term in philosophy, can also be used to mean, the unconscious, silence, madness, the other of language (ie, what it refers to and what is unsaid), etc.There may also arise the problem of relativism if the Other, as pure alterity, leads to a notion that ignores the commonality of truth.The Other manifests in the ethical theory of vegan feminist Carol J.Adams in the form of the absent referent.Other in relation to man.According to Michael Warner:
the modern system of sex and gender would not be possible without a disposition to interpret the difference between genders as the difference between self and Other ...Other or, more generally, others.Thus, according to Warner, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis hold the heterosexist view that if one is attracted to people of the same gender as one's self, one fails to distinguish self and other, identification and desire.De Beauvoir calls the Other the minority, the least favored one and often a woman, when compared to a man because, "for a man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity" (McCann, 33).Betty Friedan supported this thought when she interviewed women and the majority of them identified themselves in their role in the private sphere, rather than addressing their own personal achievements.They automatically identified as the Other without knowing (Colwill).Although the Other may be influenced by a socially constructed society, one can argue that society has the power to change this creation (Haslanger).In effort to dismantle the notion of the Other, Cheshire Calhoun proposed a deconstruction of the word "woman" from a subordinate association and reconstruct it by proving women do not need to be rationalized by male dominance (McCann, 339).This would contribute to the idea of the Other and minimize the hierarchal connotation this word implies.Edward Said applied the feminist notion of the Other to colonized peoples (specifically, in Said's work, the Middle Easterners and Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular).Kierkegaard argued that others, the crowd, is "untruth", and stressed the importance of the individual.Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, phrased it thus: "You are always a different person."As the later Lacan said: "The I is always in the field of the Other."Emmanuel Levinas, on the other hand, saw apprehension of the other as the basis for ethics, and as a limit on ontology.Paul Sartre's character Garcin, in the play Huis clos (No Exit), states that "Hell is other people."Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs.Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.New York: Columbia University Press.Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity."Introduction: Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation", Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality.Feminism and Metaphysics: Unmasking Hidden Ontologies.Feminist Local and Global Theory Perspectives Reader."Letter to Georges Izambard", Complete Works and Selected Letters.Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.New York: Monthly Review Press.This page was last modified 08:27, 15 January 2008.All Games List: Other
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