Alterity

In plain terms

When you meet something unfamiliar, the natural move is to work out what it is like. That is how understanding proceeds and most of the time it works.

Alterity is the name for what that move destroys. Some differences are not variations on something you already have - they are constituted differently, and translating them into your categories does not approximate them but replaces them with something else that fits.

The test case is always the same. If a thing can be described as a version of yours, it has been assimilated. If the description keeps failing in a way that is not merely a lack of information, you may be looking at genuine alterity - which is uncomfortable, because there is no procedure for telling the two apart from inside your own categories.

As a philosopher would put it

Alterity names the quality of otherness that resists reduction to the same. In Levinas it is what makes the ethical relation possible; in Derrida it is bound up with différance, so that identity is always constituted by what it excludes and never fully present to itself.

Irigaray's sexual difference argument treats alterity as the difference that Western thought has systematically absorbed, representing woman as a deficient or complementary version of a masculine norm rather than as other.

Postcolonial theory gives it its sharpest political form. Said's Orientalism traces how a discourse produced the Orient as a knowable object with fixed characteristics, and Spivak's question of whether the subaltern can speak asks whether representation by others can ever avoid reproducing the erasure. The anthropological ontological turn - Viveiros de Castro and others - pushes further, arguing that treating another people's account as a belief about a shared world already assimilates it, since the disagreement may be about what there is.

What is actually disputed

Whether alterity can be respected without being romanticised.

The concept warns against assimilating difference. The obvious risk is the opposite error: treating another way of living as unknowable, which is exactly how exoticism works and how colonial anthropology described the people it studied. Said's target was not insufficient respect for difference but a discourse built entirely on it.

The deeper problem is stating the position. To say that something is irreducibly other is to characterise it, and to say it cannot be assimilated to my categories is a claim made in my categories. Derrida acknowledges the bind, and treats it as a condition to be worked with rather than escaped.

Spivak's version is the hardest. If speaking for the other reproduces the erasure and silence leaves the erasure in place, then there is no clean position - which is a diagnosis rather than a solution, and she says so.