Other (philosophy)

"The other" redirects here. For other uses, seeThe Other (disambiguation).

Otheris a term used to define another person or people as separate from oneself. Inphenomenology,the termsthe Otherandthe Constitutive Otherdistinguish other people from theSelf,as a cumulative, constituting factor in theself-imageof a person; as acknowledgement ofbeing real;hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same.The Constitutive Other is the relation between thepersonality(essential nature) and the person (body) of a human being; the relation ofessentialand superficial characteristics ofpersonal identitythat corresponds to the relationship between opposite, but correlative, characteristics of the Self, because the difference is inner-difference, within the Self.

The founder of phenomenology,Edmund Husserl,identified the Other as one of the conceptual bases ofintersubjectivity,of the relations among people.

The condition and quality ofOtherness(the characteristics of the Other) is the state of being different from and alien to thesocial identityof a person and to theidentity of the Self.In thediscourseof philosophy, the term Otherness identifies and refers to the characteristics ofWho?andWhat?of the Other, which are distinct and separate fromthe Symbolicorder of things; fromthe Real(the authentic and unchangeable); from theæsthetic(art,beauty,taste); frompolitical philosophy;fromsocial normsandsocial identity;and from theSelf.Therefore, the condition of Otherness is a person's non-conformity to and with the social norms of society; and Otherness is the condition ofdisenfranchisement(political exclusion), effected either by theStateor by the social institutions (e.g., theprofessions) invested with the corresponding socio-politicalpower.Therefore, the imposition of Othernessalienatesthe person labelled as "the Other" from the centre of society, and places him or her at the margins of society, for being the Other.

The termOtheringorOtherizingdescribes the reductive action of labelling and defining a person as asubaltern native,as someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other. The practice of Othering excludes persons who do not fit the norm of thesocial group,which is a version of the Self;likewise, inhuman geography,the practice of othering persons means to exclude and displace them from the social group to the margins of society, where mainstream social norms do not apply to them, for being the Other.

Background

Philosophy

TheidealistphilosopherG. W. F. Hegelintroduced the concept of the Other as constituent part of human preoccupation with the Self.

The concept of theSelfrequires the existence ofthe constitutive Otheras the counterpart entity required fordefining the Self.Accordingly, in the late 18th century,Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel(1770–1831) introduced the concept of the Other as a constituent part ofself-consciousness(preoccupation with the Self),which complemented the propositions aboutself-awareness(capacity for introspection) proffered byJohann Gottlieb Fichte(1762–1814).

John Stuart Mill(1806–1873) introduced the idea of theother mindin 1865 inAn Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy,the first formulation of the other afterRené Descartes(1596–1650).

Edmund Husserl(1859–1938) applied the concept of the Other as the basis forintersubjectivity,the psychological relations among people. InCartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology(1931), Husserl said that the Other is constituted as analter ego,as another self.As such, the Other person posed and was an epistemological problem—of being only a perception of the consciousness of the Self.

InBeing and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology(1943),Jean-Paul Sartre(1905–1980) applied the dialectic of intersubjectivity to describe how the world is altered by the appearance of the Other, of how the world then appears to be oriented to the Other person, and not to the Self. The Other appears as a psychological phenomenon in the course of a person's life, and not as a radical threat to theexistenceof the Self. In that mode, inThe Second Sex(1949),Simone de Beauvoir(1908–1986) applied the concept of Otherness to Hegel's dialectic of the "Lord and Bondsman"(Herrschaft und Knechtschaft,1807) and found it to be like the dialectic of the Man–Woman relationship, thus a true explanation for society's treatment and mistreatment of women.

Psychology

The psychoanalystJacques Lacan(1901–1981) and the philosopher of ethicsEmmanuel Levinas(1906–1995) established the contemporary definitions, usages, and applications of the constitutive Other, as the radical counterpart of the Self. Lacan associated the Other with language and withthe symbolic orderof things. Levinas associated the Other with the ethical metaphysics ofscriptureandtradition;the ethical proposition is that the Other is superior and prior to the Self.

In the event, Levinas re-formulated theface-to-faceencounter (wherein a person is morally responsible to the Other person) to include the propositions ofJacques Derrida(1930–2004) about the impossibility of the Other (person) being an entirelymetaphysical pure-presence.That the Other could be an entity of pure Otherness (ofalterity) personified in arepresentationcreated and depicted with language that identifies, describes, and classifies. The conceptual re-formulation of the nature of the Other also included Levinas's analysis of the distinction between "the saying and the said";nonetheless, the nature of the Other retained the priority ofethicsovermetaphysics.

In the psychology of the mind (e.g.R. D. Laing), the Other identifies and refers tothe unconscious mind,tosilence,toinsanity,and to language ( "to what is referred and to what is unsaid" ).Nonetheless, in such psychologic and analytic usages, there might arise a tendency torelativismif the Other person (as a being of pure, abstract alterity) leads to ignoring the commonality oftruth.Likewise, problems arise from unethical usages of the terms The Other, Otherness, and Othering to reinforceontological divisionsof reality: ofbeing,ofbecoming,and ofexistence.

Ethics

The philosopher ofethicsEmmanuel Lévinassaid that the infinite demand the Other places on the Self makes ethics the foundation of human existence and philosophy.

InTotality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority(1961), Emmanuel Lévinas said that previous philosophy had reduced the constitutive Other to an object of consciousness, by not preserving its absolutealterity—the innate condition of otherness, by which the Other radically transcends the Self and the totality of the human network, into which the Other is being placed. As a challenge to self-assurance, the existence of the Other is a matter of ethics, because the ethical priority of the Other equals the primacy of ethics overontologyin real life.

From that perspective, Lévinas described the nature of the Other as "insomnia and wakefulness"; anecstasy(an exteriority) towards the Other that forever remains beyond any attempt at fully capturing the Other, whose Otherness is infinite; even in the murder of an Other, the Otherness of the person remains uncontrolled and not negated. The infinity of the Other allowed Lévinas to derive other aspects of philosophy and science as secondary to that ethic; thus:

The others that obsess me in the Other do not affect me as examples of the samegenusunited with my neighbor, by resemblance or common nature,individuationsof the human race, or chips off the old block.... The others concern me from the first. Here, fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the Other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others.—Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence

Critical theory

Jacques Derrida said that the absolutealterityof the Other is compromised, because the Other person isother thanthe Self and the group. The logic ofalterity(otherness) is especially negative in the realm ofhuman geography,wherein the native Other is deniedethical priorityas a person with the right to participate in the geopolitical discourse with an empire who decides the colonial fate of the homeland of the Other. In that vein, the language of Otherness used inOriental Studiesperpetuates the cultural perspective of the dominantor–dominated relation, which is characteristic ofhegemony;likewise, the sociologic misrepresentation ofthe feminineas the sexual Other to man reassertsmale privilegeas the primary voice in social discourse between women and men.

InThe Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq(2004), the geographerDerek Gregorysaid that the US government's ideologic answers to questions about reasons for the terrorist attacks against the U.S. (i.e. 11 September 2001) reinforced the imperial purpose of the negative representations of the Middle-Eastern Other; especially when President G. W. Bush (2001–2009) rhetorically asked: "Why do they hate us?" as political prelude to theWar on Terror(2001).Bush's rhetorical interrogation of armed resistance to empire, by the non–Western Other, produced an Us-and-Them mentality in American relations with the non-white peoples of the Middle East; hence, as foreign policy, the War on Terror is fought for control of imaginary geographies, which originated from thefetishisedcultural representations of the Other invented byOrientalists;the cultural criticEdward Saïdsaid that:

To build a conceptual framework around a notion of Us-versus-Them is, in effect, to pretend that the principal consideration isepistemologicaland natural—our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange—whereas, in fact, the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed, and situational.

— The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq(2004), p. 24.

Imperialism and colonialism

The contemporary,post-colonialworld system of nation-states (with interdependent politics and economies) was preceded by the Europeanimperial systemof economic and settlercoloniesin which "the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, usually between states, and often in the form of an empire, [was] based ondominationandsubordination."In the imperialist world system, political and economic affairs were fragmented, and the discrete empires "provided for most of their own needs... [and disseminated] their influence solely through conquest [empire] or the threat of conquest [hegemony]."

Racism

A manifestation of the Other in the form ofscientific racism:In this 1857 illustration from his workIndigenous Races of the Earth,anthropologistJosiah C. Nottjustified anti-Black racism by claiming that the features of African-Americans had more in common withchimpanzeesthan humans in comparison to white people.

The racialist perspective of theWestern worldduring the 18th and 19th centuries was invented with the Othering of non-white peoples, which also was supported with the fabrications ofscientific racism,such as the pseudo-science ofphrenology,which claimed that, in relation to a white-man's head, the head-size of the non-European Other indicated inferior intelligence; e.g. theapartheid-eracultural representations ofcoloured peopleinSouth Africa(1948–94).

Consequent tothe Holocaust(1941–1945), with documents such asThe Race Question(1950) and theDeclaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination(1963), the United Nations officially declared that racial differences are insignificant to anthropological likeness among human beings. Despite the United Nations' factual dismissal ofracialism,institutional Othering in the United States produces the cultural misrepresentation of political refugees asillegal immigrants(from overseas) and of immigrants asillegal aliens(usually from México).

Orientalism

To European people, imperialism (military conquest of non-white people, annexation, and economic integration of their countries to the motherland) was intellectually justified by (among other reasons)orientalism,the study andfetishizationof theEastern worldas "primitive peoples" requiring modernisation thecivilising mission.Colonial empires were justified and realised with essentialist and reductiverepresentations(of people, places, and cultures) in books and pictures and fashion, which conflated different cultures and peoples into the binary relation ofthe Orientandthe Occident.Orientalism created theartificial existenceof the Western Self and the non–western Other.Orientalists rationalised the cultural artifice of a difference ofessencebetween white and non-white peoples to fetishize (identify, classify, subordinate) the peoples and cultures of Asia into "the Oriental Other" —who existsin opposition tothe Western Self.As a function of imperial ideology,Orientalismfetishizes people and things in three actions ofcultural imperialism:(i) Homogenization (all Oriental peoples are one folk); (ii) Feminization (the Oriental always is subordinate in the East–West relation); and (iii) Essentialization (a people possess universal characteristics); thus established by Othering, the empire'scultural hegemonyreduces to inferiority the people, places, and things of the Eastern world, as measured against the West, the standard of superior civilisation.

Subaltern native

Thesubaltern nativeis a colonial identity for the Other, which conceptually derives from theCultural hegemonywork ofAntonio Gramsci,an Italian Marxist intellectual.

Colonial stability requires thecultural subordinationof the non-white Other for transformation into thesubaltern native;a colonised people who facilitate theexploitation of their labour,of their lands, and of the natural resources of their country. The practise of Othering justifies the physical domination and cultural subordination of the native people by degrading them—first from being a national-citizen to being a colonial-subject—and then by displacing them to the periphery of the colony, and of geopolitical enterprise that is imperialism.

Using thefalse dichotomyof "colonial strength" (imperial power) against "native weakness" (military, social, and economic), the coloniser invents the non-white Other in an artificial dominator-dominated relationship that can be resolved only throughracialistnoblesse oblige,the "moral responsibility" that psychologically allows the colonialist Self to believe that imperialism is acivilising missionto educate, convert, and then culturally assimilate the Other into the empire—thus transforming the "civilised" Other into the Self.

In establishing a colony, Othering a non-white people allowed the colonisers to physically subdue and "civilise" the natives to establish thehierarchies of domination(political and social) required for exploiting the subordinated natives and their country.As a function of empire, a settler colony is an economic means for profitably disposing of two demographic groups: (i) the colonists (surplus population of the motherland) and (ii) the colonised (the subaltern native to be exploited) who antagonistically define and represent the Other as separate and apart from the colonial Self.

Othering establishes unequal relationships of power between the colonised natives and the colonisers, who believe themselvesessentially superiorto the natives whom they othered into racial inferiority, as the non-white Other.That dehumanisation maintains the false binary-relations of social class,caste,andrace,of sex and gender, and of nation and religion.The profitable functioning of a colony (economic or settler) requires continual protection of the cultural demarcations that are basic to the unequalsocio-economic relationbetween the "civilised man" (the colonist) and the "savage man", thus the transformation of the Other into the colonial subaltern.

Gender and sex

LGBT identities

Thesocial exclusionfunction of Othering a person or a social group from mainstream society to the social margins—for being essentially different from thesocietal norm(the plural Self)—is a socio-economic function of gender. In a society wherein man–womanheterosexualityis the sexual norm, the Other refers to and identifieslesbians(women who love women) andgays(men who love men) as people ofsame-sex orientationwhom society has othered as "sexually deviant" from the norms of binary-gender heterosexuality.In practise, sexual Othering is realised by applying the negative denotations and connotations of the terms that describe lesbian, gay,bisexual,andtransgenderpeople, in order to diminish their personal social status andpolitical power,and so displace their LGBT communities to the legal margin of society. To neutralise such cultural Othering, LGBT communitiesqueera city by creating social spaces that use the spatial and temporal plans of the city to allow the LGBT communities free expression of theirsocial identities,e.g. aboystown,agay-pride parade,etc.; as such,queeringurban spaces is a political means for the non-binary sexual Other to establish themselves as citizens integral to thereality(cultural and socio-economic) of their city'sbody politic.

Womanas identity

The philosopher of existentialism Simone de Beauvoir developed the concept of The Other to explain the workings of the Man–Woman binary gender relation, as a critical base of the Dominator–Dominated relation, which characterises sexual inequality between men and women.

Thephilosopher of feminism,Cheshire Calhounidentified the female Other as the female-half of the binary-gender relation that is the Man and Woman relation. Thedeconstructionof the wordWoman(the subordinate party in the ManandWoman relation) produced aconceptual reconstructionof the female Other as the Woman who exists independently of male definition, asrationalisedby patriarchy. That the female Other is a self-aware Woman who isautonomousand independent of the patriarchy's formal subordination of the female sex with the institutional limitations ofsocial convention,tradition,andcustomary law;the social subordination of women is communicated (denoted and connoted) in thesexist usagesof the wordWoman.

In 1949, the philosopher ofexistentialism,Simone de BeauvoirappliedHegel's conception of "the Other" (as a constituent part ofself-awareness) to describe a male-dominated culture thatrepresentsWoman as the sexual Other to Man. In a patriarchal culture, the Man–Woman relation is society's normative binary-gender relation, whereinthe sexual Otheris a socialminoritywith the leastsocio-political agency,usually the women of the community, because patriarchalsemanticsestablished that "a man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of [the word]Manto designate human beings in general; whereas [the word]Womanrepresents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity "from the first sex, from Man.

In 1957,Betty Friedanreported that a woman's social identity is formally established by the sexual politics of the Ordinate–Subordinate nature of the Man–Woman sexual relation, the social norm in the patriarchal West. When queried about their post-graduate lives, the majority of women interviewed at a university-class reunion, used binary gender language, and referred to and identified themselves by their social roles (wife, mother, lover) in the private sphere of life; and did not identify themselves by their own achievements (job, career, business) in the public sphere of life. Unawares, the women had actedconventionally,and automatically identified and referred to themselves as the social Other to men.

Although the nature of the social Other is influenced by the society's social constructs (social class,sex,gender), as a human organisation, society holds thesocio-political powerto formally change the social relation between the male-defined Self andWoman,the sexual Other, who is not male.

In feminist definition, women are the Other to men (but not the Other proposed by Hegel) and are not existentially defined by masculine demands; and also are the social Other who unknowingly accepts social subjugation as part ofsubjectivity,because the gender identity of woman is constitutionally different from the gender identity of man. The harm of Othering is in the asymmetric nature of unequal roles in sexual and gender relations; the inequality arises from the social mechanics ofintersubjectivity.

Knowledge

Cultural representations

The Yellow Terror in all His Glory,an 1899 editorial cartoon depicting a Chinese man standing over a fallen white woman. The Chinese man, the "other", represents theBoxer movementand the woman represents Christian Europeans.

About the production ofknowledgeof the Other who is notthe Self,the philosopherMichel Foucaultsaid thatOtheringis the creation and maintenance of imaginary "knowledge of the Other" —which comprises cultural representations in service tosocio-political powerand the establishment ofhierarchies of domination.Thatcultural representationsof the Other (as a metaphor, as a metonym, and as an anthropomorphism) are manifestations of the xenophobia inherent to the European historiographies that defined and labelled non–European peoples as the Other who is not the European Self. Supported by the reductive discourses (academic and commercial, geopolitical and military) of the empire'sdominant ideology,the colonialist misrepresentations of the Other explain the Eastern world to the Western world as a binary relation of native weakness against colonial strength.

In the 19th-centuryhistoriographiesof the Orient as a cultural region, the Orientalists studied only what they said was thehigh culture(languages and literatures, arts and philologies) of the Middle East, but did not study that geographic space as a place inhabited by different nations and societies.About that Western version of the Orient, Edward Saïd said that:

the Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient intoWestern learning,Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. If this definition of Orientalism seems more political than not, that is simply because I think Orientalism was, itself, a product of certain political forces and activities.

Orientalism is a school of interpretation whose material happens to be the Orient, its civilisations, peoples, and localities. Its objective discoveries – the work of innumerable devoted scholars who edited texts and translated them, codified grammars, wrote dictionaries, reconstructed dead epochs, producedpositivisticallyverifiable learning – are and always have been conditioned by the fact that its truths, like any truths delivered by language, are embodied in language, and, what is the truth of language?, Nietzsche once said, but "a mobile army ofmetaphors,metonyms,andanthropomorphisms– in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which, after long use, seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are. "

— Orientalism(1978) pp. 202–203.

In so far as the Orient occurred in theexistentialawareness of the Western world, as a term, The Orient later accrued many meanings and associations, denotations, and connotations that did not refer to the real peoples, cultures, and geography of the Eastern world, but toOriental studies,the academic field about the Orient as a word.

Academia

In "Cosmographia"(1570), by Sebastian Münster,"Europa regina"is the cartographic centre of the world.

In the Eastern world, the field ofOccidentalism,the investigation programme and academic curriculum of and aboutthe essenceof the West—Europe as a culturally homogeneous place—did not exist as a counterpart to Orientalism.In thepostmodern era,the Orientalist practices ofhistorical negationism,the writing of distorted histories about the places and peoples of "The East", continues in contemporary journalism; e.g. in the Third World, political parties practice Othering with fabricated facts about threat-reports and non-existent threats (political, social, military) that are meant to politically delegitimise opponent political parties composed of people from the social and ethnic groups designated as the Other in that society.

The Othering of a person or of a social group—by means of an idealethnocentricity(the ethnic group of the Self) that evaluates and assigns negative, culturalmeaningto the ethnic Other—is realised throughcartography;hence, the maps of Western cartographers emphasised and bolstered artificial representations of the national-identities, the natural resources, and the cultures of the native inhabitants, as culturally inferior to the West.

Historically, Western cartography often featured distortions (proportionate, proximate, and commercial) of places and true distances by placing the cartographer'shomelandin the centre of themapamundi;these ideas were often utilized to supportimperialistic expansion.In contemporary cartography, the polar-perspective maps of the northern hemisphere, drawn by U.S. cartographers, also frequently feature distorted spatial relations (distance, size, mass) of and between the U.S. and Russia which according to historian Jerome D. Fellman emphasise the perceived inferiority (military, cultural, geopolitical) of the Russian Other.

Practical perspectives

Orientalist art:The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus(1511) features wildlife (the deer in the foreground) that is not native to Syria.

InKey Concepts in Political Geography(2009),Alison Mountzproposed concrete definitions of the Other as a philosophic concept and as a term withinphenomenology;as a noun, the Other identifies and refers to a person and to a group of persons; as a verb, the Other identifies and refers to a category and a label for persons and things.

Post-colonial scholarship demonstrated that, in pursuit of empire, "the colonizing powers narrated an 'Other' whom they set out to save, dominate, control, [and] civilize... [in order to] extract resources through colonization" of the country whose people the colonial power designated as the Other.As facilitated byOrientalist representationsof the non–Western Other,colonization—theeconomic exploitationof a people and their land—is misrepresented as acivilizing missionlaunched for the material, cultural, and spiritual benefit of the colonized peoples.

Counter to the post-colonial perspective of the Other as part of a Dominator–Dominated binary relationship, postmodern philosophy presents the Other and Otherness asphenomenologicalandontologicalprogress for Man and Society. Public knowledge of thesocial identityof peoplesclassifiedas "Outsiders" isde factoacknowledgement of their beingreal,thus they are part of thebody politic,especially in the cities. As such, "the post-modern city is a geographical celebration ofdifferencethat moves sites once conceived of as 'marginal' to the [social] centre of discussion and analysis "of thehuman relationsbetween the Outsiders and the Establishment.

See also

• Allophilia
• Allosemitism
• Alterity
• Caste system in India
• Dissociative Identity Disorder
• Exoticism
• Generalized other
• Identity politics
• Kyriarchy
• Markedness
• Marx's theory of alienation
• Open individualism
• Otherness of childhood
• Role suction
• Social alienation
• Vertiginous question
• Xenocentrism

Books

• Orientalism(1978), byEdward Saïd
• The Wretched of the Earth,(1961), byFrantz Fanon
• The Other(2006), byRyszard Kapuściński
• The Other,1972 movie based on the novel by Thomas Tryon.

Sexual difference

• Judith Butler
• Julia Kristeva
• Luce Irigaray
• Sarojini Sahoo

Sources

• Thomas, Calvin,ed. (2000). "Introduction: Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation",Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality.University of Illinois Press.ISBN0-252-06813-0.
• Cahoone, Lawrence(1996).From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology.Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
• Colwill, Elizabeth. (2005).Reader—Wmnst 590: Feminist Thought.KB Books.
• Haslanger, Sally.Feminism and Metaphysics:Unmasking Hidden Ontologies.28 November 2005.
• McCann, Carole.Kim, Seung-Kyung. (2003).Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives.Routledge. New York, NY.
• Rimbaud, Arthur(1966). "Letter to Georges Izambard",Complete Works and Selected Letters.Trans.Wallace Fowlie.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich(1974).The Gay Science.Trans.Walter Kaufmann.New York: Vintage.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de(1986).Course in General Linguistics.Eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court.
• Lacan, Jacques(1977).Écrits: A Selection.Trans.Alan Sheridan.New York: Norton.
• Althusser, Louis(1973).Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Warner, Michael (1990). "Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality",Engendering Men,p. 191. Eds. Boone and Cadden, London UK: Routledge.
• Tuttle, Howard (1996).The Crowd is Untruth,Peter Lang Publishing,ISBN0-8204-2866-3.

Further reading

• Levinas, Emmanuel (1974).Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence.(Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence).
• Levinas, Emmanuel (1972).Humanism de l'autre homme.Fata Morgana.
• Lacan, Jacques (1966).Ecrits.London: Tavistock, 1977.
• Lacan, Jacques (1964).The Four Fondamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis.London: Hogarth Press, 1977.
• Foucault, Michel (1990).The History of Sexualityvol. 1:An Introduction.Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.
• Derrida, Jacques (1973).Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs.Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
• Kristeva, Julia (1982).Powers of Horror: An Essay onAbjection.Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Butler, Judith (1990).Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.New York: Routledge.
• Butler, Judith (1993).Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex".New York: Routledge.
• Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "'Etymythological Othering' and the Power of 'Lexical Engineering' in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. A Socio-Philo(sopho)logical Perspective",Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion,edited by Tope Omoniyi and Joshua A. Fishman, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 237–258.

External links

• The Centre for Studies in Otherness