Quotes About Alterity

Preaching tolerance and respect for alterity while ignoring capitalism's systemic violence produces a toothless anti-racism, an anti-racism only comfortable with blaming the type of behavior witnessed in the events of Charlottesville. This type of anti-racism is never sufficient to produce meaningful change.

Absolute alterity, as long as it remains absolute, cannot be apprehended at all; there is, effectively, no such thing.

In establishing a pole of internal identity in relation to the environment, the autopoietic process brings forth, in the same stroke, what counts as other, the organism's world. To exist as an individual means not simply to be numerically distinct from other things but to be a self-pole in a dynamic relationship with alterity, with what is other, with the world.

The first thing missing if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another.5 Without alterity, there can be no empathy.

There can only be a true life as an other life, and it's from the point of view of this other life that the ordinary life of ordinary people will be made to appear as precisely other than the true. I live in an other way, and through the very alterity of my life, I show you that what you are looking for is elsewhere than where you are looking, that the road you are taking is an other road than the one you should be taking.

TotuÈ™i, înc? de la început, sunt configuraÈ›i ca duÈ™mani nu atât cei care ne amenin?? direct (cum ar fi cazul barbarilor), ci aceia pe care cineva are interes s?-i reprezinte ca fiind amenin??tori, chiar dac? nu ne amenin?? direct, astfel încât nu caracterul lor amenin??tor s? le scoat? în relief alteritatea, ci alteritatea lor s? devin? semn de ameninÈ›are.

London was a graveyard haunted by dead faiths. A city and a landscape. A market laid on feudalisms. Gathering and hunting, little pockets of alterity, too, but most of all in the level Billy had come to live in a tilework of fiefdoms, theocratic duchies, zones and spheres of influences, over each of which some local despot, some criminal pope, sat watch. It was all who-knew-whom, gave access to what, greased which palms on what route to where.

They say there is always a photographic moment to be seized where the most banal of beings yield up their secret identity. But what is interesting is their secret alterity, and rather than looking for the identity beneath the appearances, we should look for the mask beneath the identity, the figure which haunts us and diverts us from our identities -- the masked divinity which, in effect, haunts each of us for a moment, one day or another.

All at once the exteriority of the world for the body that opens up to it, the distance of the things in front of this body, their absolute alterity, the body's folding back outside everything that it captures and yet its implication in the visible, the turning back of the visible upon itself that constitutes it as seeing and that causes it to perceive from the very foundation of being to which it adheres.

Fostering magical thinking, the chivalric romance yields a space-time in which the marvelous co-exists at all times with mundane routines. Its magic is able to envision the invisible, to endow the amorphous with palpable shape, and to place illusion and reality on the same level. Concurrently, the romance reminds us that it is essential to value the magical realm's irreducible alterity and inscrutability, rather than attempt to tame it by rationalizing its wonders.

By the 19th century, a stereotyped lexicon of alterity had come into being that included twisting, melismatic melodic lines and non-standard scales often featuring augmented seconds: