'The category of the Other,' Simone de Beauvoir declared in the opening pages of The Second Sex, 'is as primordial as consciousness itself.' No doubt she was right. But it is hard to believe that the term has ever had such intellectual currency as it has at present. Whether in works of high theory or in the popular press, invocations of 'the Other', 'otherness' - even 'othering' - continue to proliferate. At times, all this talk proves more fashionable than productive, turning 'other' into little more than a glib synonym for 'victim'. Even as 'otherness' threatens to become all too familiar, however, thinking about the human impulse to distinguish self from not-self can still help to decode our political and cultural arrangements. The 'primordial' category need not be simple.

LRB 19 November 1992 | PDF Download