Abstract: SUMMARY Anthropology's approach to the study of difference has been marked by dramatic shifts defined in political terms. Nonetheless, the accompanying historical trajectory of the discipline's theorization of politics hasn't substantially changed, and has focused less on what constitutes politics, its terms and concepts, and more on how to do politics, often with the assumption that this politics should be in solidarity with the victims of unequal relations of power. In so doing, anthropology has often reinforced humanist assumptions about the human, based on the liberal subject of European modernity. An analysis of Jewish-Israeli political identifications puts into question such humanist assumptions. I show how an analysis of two examples from my fieldwork in Israel calls into question concepts of community and identity, including that of the human, as the foundational ground on which anthropology's analyses of politics often rest. Drawing on Freud's concept of melancholia, and on a Levinasian concept of alterity, I suggest the notion of a melancholic anthropology as the study of difference which acknowledges the inhuman within the human, and the impossibility of a common humanity. This article thus builds on recent discussions about how anthropological investments in doing politics have consequences for understandings of responsibility, ethics, and the human itself. [Israel, Jew, alterity, politics, anthropology, human].

Abstract: Alterity or otherness is a central notion in cultural anthropology and philosophy, as well as in other disciplines. While anthropology, with its aim of understanding cultural difference, tends to take otherness as a fact, there have been vigorous attempts in contemporary philosophy, particularly in phenomenology, to answer the fundamental question: What is the Other? This book brings the two approaches to otherness – the hermeneutical pragmatics of anthropology, and the radical reflection of philosophy – together, with the goal of enriching one through the other. The philosophy of the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, up to now little known to anthropologists, has a central position in this undertaking. Waldenfels’s concept of a responsivity to the Other offers to cultural anthropology the possibility of a philosophical engagement with the Other that does not contradict the project of making sense of concrete empirical others. The book illustrates the fertility of this new approach to alterity through a broad spectrum of themes, ranging from reflections on theory formation, via discussions of race and human-animal relations, to personal meditations on experiences of alterity.

Abstract: In this paper, I present a theoretical approach on the concept of gender regarding the racial studies. In other words, I would like to analyse the double alterity of Black woman considering the feminist theories and the racial studies. This article is dedicate to give visibility to historical and philosophical perspectives in the Black feminism in Brazil and in the United States.

Abstract: Emmanuel Levinas is a profoundly influential figure in several post–World War II continental European philosophical traditions. A growing scholarship has started to explore the links between his work and Judaism and, inter alia, phenomenology, feminism, and deconstruction, but very little has been written in the English-speaking world on the connections between his thought and that of Marx. This essay is an attempt at an encounter between the two thinkers, exploring how Levinas’s radical critique of ontology in the Western philosophical traditions can be brought to bear on Marx’s antihumanist critique of capitalism as a way to think of an alternative ethical stand that starts from alterity, which is where the essay finds the spirituality of both thinkers to reside. While the theoretical planes on which they operate are different, through a difficult but necessary conversation, Levinas and Marx can pose to one another fundamental questions with crucial implications for their orientation.

Abstract: In a recent article addressing academia’s ongoing reluctance to accept online publishing, David Gunkel contends that suspicion stems from pervasive skepticism regarding the Internet’s legitimacy as a social technology. “This occurs,” he explains, “because of a prevailing assumption among academics in particular that the information available online is dubious, untrustworthy, and suspicious” (2007a: 1). Gunkel’s argument brings to light one dimension of the material consequences of pervasive, and institutionally entrenched, hostilities towards online communication networks. Despite the extent to which online platforms’ importance as a source for news and other information is increasingly incontestable, concerns remain deeply entrenched, and are evident in a myriad of cultural discourses. This essay argues that the “othered” status of the Internet as a network technology, a stain acquired from association with fringe and unwholesome content, is of particular significance in terms of its relationship to contemporary discourses of terrorism and counter-terrorism surrounding the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers. I examine diverse, yet connected, artifacts that speak to this phenomenon through an engagement of Žižek with Deleuze. These objects include popular television program “Homeland” (on the “Showtime” premium network) and New York Times news coverage surrounding it, two

Abstract: The article assesses a postcolonial critique of Emmanuel Levinas’ thought. Levinas’ work has recently been accused of Eurocentrism, racism and xenophobia; those accusations are supported by recorded interviews, which at times voice bigoted and xenophobic remarks. What postcolonial critics suggest is that these remarks are made possible by Levinas’ philosophical commitments to phenomenology and Europe as an intellectual process. The article gives an assessment of the postcolonial critique and argues that the critique is necessitous but incomplete and extends a uniformity thesis that carries with it a set of questionable assumptions regarding the connection of philosophy and historical narratives.

Abstract: To what extent is a productive encounter between Levinas’s thought and non-Western and postcolonial ethical frameworks and conceptions of difference and alterity possible? This programmatic essay will certainly not be able to answer this question – not even in part. It does, however, endeavour to lay the groundwork upon which we might start to explore such an encounter by first critically assessing some of the stumbling blocks in the way of dialogue. Upon closer inspection, Levinas and his thought are beset by prejudices that cast a disparaging shadow over his well-known exposure of the violence at the very heart of Western philosophy – the reductive tendency of the Self to reduce, subject or “colonize” all forms of alterity that cross its path. Within the canon of contemporary Western philosophy, his has been one of the most prominent voices – alongside those of Rosenzweig, Buber, Ricœur, Derrida, Honneth and many others – to place the inherent responsibility we bear towards others centre stage. It could be argued that Levinas’s ethical metaphysics spearheaded a decisive re-construal of the decentred subject of the second half of the twentieth century in terms of its fundamental relatedness to the Other. This Other is not merely the one who appeals to me in the face of the beggar, the orphan or the widow, as the Levinas of Totality and Infinity (1961) famously contends. In his second magnum opus, Otherwise Than Being and Beyond Essence (1974), Levinas more radically insists that this Other is an alterity lodged within the self. As we shall see, Levinas’s conception of alterity is of a completely different order than the alterity of Strangers – i.e. those others of non-Western cultures that belong to the mundane historical world, revealed in being horizontally (horizontalement). Levinas’s alterity is the alterity of transcendence – an epiphany of what Levinas calls “sense” that breaks through the horizontality of cultural meaning. When considering the possibility of a critical encounter between Levinas with his conceptualization of the Other as an alterity of transcendence, and non-Western conceptions of the other – that would be the alterity of Strangers from a Levinasian vantage point – one faces a number of challenges. First and foremost, Levinas has been guilty of a number of explicitly racist remarks. For example, in “The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic” on the Sino-Soviet tension, an article published in 1960 in Esprit, Levinas writes:

Abstract: This essay argues for the reclamation of radical alterity or the intentional embracing of difference/otherness/strangeness by Muslims as a location of solidarity with marginalized communities, who ...

Abstract: This essay analyzes representations of corporeal difference in David Toscana's Santa Maria del Circo, and Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador. In each text, the body of the protagonist enacts a conflation between physical deformity and marked ethnicity, read here as Jewishness. At the same time, these texts trouble connections between body and meaning, highlight the limits of textual representation, and question the contours of specific Spanish American national, cultural, ethnic and individual identities, as frequently bound to codified syntaxes of corporeality and alterity. The body as text, a figure of simultaneous suture and divide, points to the continuing need for a renegotiation of the roles of disabled or "different" bodies in the context of Latin American literary and cultural studies.

Abstract: In this paper, I aim to defend Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics against what I call the radical hermeneutic critique, specifically the critique developed in Robert Bernasconi’s article “’You Don’t Know What I’m Talking About’: Alterity and the Hermeneutic Ideal” (1995). Key to this critique is the claim that Gadamer’s account does not rise to the ethical task of embracing the alterity of the Other, but instead reduces it to a projection of one’s self. The implication is therefore that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has to be rejected on ethical grounds, as it does not appreciate but assimilates the alterity of the Other. In contrast to this radical hermeneutic critique, I argue that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics can accommodate an Other that is not assimilated but appreciated, on the condition that the unique status of a dialogue with the Other as a person is no longer neglected, as Gadamer does, but instead truly distinguished from a dialogue with the Other as a text.

Abstract: RESUMEN : El proposito de este articulo es mostrar los procesos de emergencia y constitucion de la comunidad intersubjetiva en Hegel y Husserl. Si bien se intenta una relacion cruzada entre ambos en la direccion en que ya lo ha hecho P. Ricoeur (1986), el analisis revela profundas diferencias que conciernen a los respectivos enfoques hermeneuticos y fenomenologicos desde los que aborda el problema de la aparicion y la experiencia de la alteridad. ABSTRACT : The purpose of the present article is to expound the processes of emergence and constitution of the intersubjective community in Hegel and Husserl. Along the lines proposed by Paul Ricoeur (1986), we explore the thesis of a close relationship between their approaches. However, the analysis ultimately reveals profound differences in their respective hermeneutic and phenomenological views regarding the problem of the appearance and experience of alterity.

Abstract: Since the publication and reception of Levinas’s critique of Heidegger, it has become standard practice among some authors to argue that Heidegger’s thinking of being, both early and late, is an insistent meditation on the alterity of the self in the call of conscience and the alterity of being in relation to beings, and that this thought is consequently already ‘ethical’. This line of argument has been recently pursued by Dastur, Raffoul, and Ricoeur. None of them contests that there is a difference between the alterity of the self and the alterity of the other. But they argue that the experience of the first is the condition of possibility of gaining access to the second. There are several reasons why I have failed to be convinced by this argument. In this paper, I spell out those reasons and argue that Ricoeur’s attempt to carve out a path between Heidegger and Levinas remains unsuccessful.