{"tema_id":"981","string":"Alterity","created":"2018-10-11 01:45:44","code":null,"notes":[{"@type":"Scope note","@lang":"en-US","@value":"Alterity is derived from the Latin alteritas, meaning \u2018the state of being other or different; diversity, otherness\u2019. Its English derivatives are alternate, alternative, alternation, and alter ego. The term alterit\u00e9 is more common in French, and has the antonym identit\u00e9 ( Johnson and Smith 1990: xviii). The term was adopted by philosophers as an alternative to \u2018otherness\u2019 to register a change in the Western perceptions of the relationship between consciousness and the world. Since Descartes, individual consciousness had been taken as the privileged starting point for consciousness, and \u2018the \u201cother\u201d appears in these [post-Enlightenment] philosophies as a reduced \u201cother,\u201das an epistemological question\u2019(xix). That is, in a concept of the human in which everything stems from the notion that \u2018I think, therefore I am\u2019, the chief concern with the other is to be able to answer questions such as \u2018How can I know the other?\u2019, \u2018How can other minds be known?\u2019 The term \u2018alterity\u2019 shifts the focus of analysis away from these philosophic concerns with otherness \u2013 the \u2018epistemic other\u2019, the other that is only important to the extent to which it can be known \u2013 to the more concrete \u2018moral other\u2019 \u2013 the other who is actually located in a political, cultural, linguistic or religious context (xix). This is a key feature of changes in the concept of subjectivity, because, whether seen in the context of ideology, psychoanalysis or discourse, the \u2018construction\u2019 of the subject itself can be seen to be inseparable from the construction of its others.\nLiterary theorists commonly see the most influential use of alterity in Mikhail Bakhtin\u2019s description of the way in which an author moves away from identification with a character (Todorov 1984).The novelist must understand his or her character from within, as it were, but must also perceive it as other, as apart from its creator in its distinct alterity.Importantly,dialogue is only possible with an \u2018other\u2019,so alterity, in Bakhtin\u2019s formulation, is not simply \u2018exclusion\u2019, but an apartness that stands as a precondition of dialogue, where dialogue implies a transference across and between differences of culture, gender, class and other social categories. This is related to his concept of \u2018exotopy\u2019 or \u2018outsideness\u2019, which is not simply alienness, but a precondition for the author\u2019s ability to understand and formulate a character, a precondition for dialogue itself. In post-colonial theory,the term has often been used interchangeably with otherness and difference. However, the distinction that initially held between otherness and alterity \u2013 that between otherness as a philosophic problem and otherness as a feature of a material and\u00a0 discursive location \u2013 is peculiarly applicable to post-colonial discourse. The self-identity of the colonizing subject, indeed the identity of imperial culture,is inextricable from the alterity of colonized others,an alterity determined, according to Spivak, by a process of othering. The possibility for potential dialogue between racial and cultural others has also remained an important aspect of the use of the word, which distinguishes it from its synonyms.\nSource: Post - colonial studies: the key concepts.\u00a0 Link "}]}