Abstract: Sandra Young has written a compelling monograph on the mapping of alterity in books published in sixteenth century in Europe. As she puts it, this study is primarily animated by a desire to reveal ...

Abstract: Just as the natives of lands colonized by Europeans were considered "wild" or "slow," they have also been the object of praise that has gone as far as idealization, and that have emerged especially among the intellectual elites of European origin. This last type of discourses and imaginaries, relatively rare and scarcely studied, seems to be opposed to racism and would invite an appreciation of cultural diversity. However, this article aims to propose a critical analysis of this praise of alterity, which, contrary to what is usually believed, is not a recent intellectual advance, but a discourse based on ancient pre-modern myths. To achieve this goal, a hermeneutic analysis of the discourses of authors and collectives recognized in the West, who have resorted to positively connoted terms to describe the cultures of non-European peoples was made. In these discourses, some general patterns were observed, which allowed them to be related to mythical structures of long duration, such as the Christian myth of the Garden of Eden and the Greek-Latin myth of a Golden Age. As an extension of this, today we can consider the Other "natural" and "traditional" as the example of an admirable human being. However, in this article it is concluded that such representations, although nowadays considered as politically correct, are based on specialized versions of alterity, which in reality reproduce hegemonic ideals and contribute to hide the complexity of the cultural diversity.

Abstract: When an Aboriginal family group called ‘Aunty Joan Mob’ travel ‘out bush’, they make contact with awe- and fear-inspiring country. In attempting to make sense of their wonder, I would be ill-served...

Abstract: Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy and J.R.R. Tolkien’s creative work both upheld the rights of the individual Other in the face of dogmatism and totalitarianism. For both Tolkien and Levinas, who is often credited with being the originator of the concept of alterity, our relationship with the Other is necessarily an ethical relationship established through language. To respond to the Other while acknowledging his or her absolute Otherness is also to accept responsibility for him or her. The presence of many of Levinas’s principles in the relationships between radically different characters in Tolkien’s legendarium suggests that Tolkien’s fiction was on the cutting edge of philosophical enquiry. Well before the publication of Levinas’s major works, Tolkien had begun exploring themes related to language as the primal expression of our responsibility toward the Other.

Abstract: The reality is a construction. The reality of Africa is being continuously constructed by non-Africans despite the flatness of the world preached by globalization. The West continues to portray Africa as the home of underdevelopment, poverty, diseases and corruption while overlooking the successes recorded by the continent. This paper traces the genesis of this perception, its development over the years and recommends solutions to the malaise.

Abstract: abstract:Inspired by Columbus's short- lived misreading of accounts that describe the supposedly man- eating Caniba as the soldiers of the Great Khan of China, this essay analyzes representations of cannibalism in China and Latin America in the early modern age. This anecdote, involving cannibal (mis)translation between Europe, the Americas, and China, forms the basis for a reflection on early modern constructions of cultural identity and alterity. Instead of looking through a European perspective that would treat the Americas and China as cultural antipodes—one a territory in need of civilizing, one an object of civilizational envy—the essay focuses on a comparison of representations of cannibalism in China and Latin America by paying particular attention to the tension between, on the one hand, the impulse to frame cannibalism as barbarian atrocity that would deny its practitioners humanity and, on the other hand, cannibal imaginaries as an integral part of civilization. In dialogue with scholarly reflections on the early modern period as a global constellation as well as with recent theories of intercultural comparison, this essay's consideration of cannibal translations between China and Latin America performs and tests a type of comparison that combines an attention to links between two cultures with observations on the patterns of similarity and difference that structure such comparisons.

Abstract: This article aims to study the role of transpositions as devices that produced identity and alterity in the Early Modern Western World. The starting point will be the analysis of concrete uses of illustrations, ekfrasein, and allegories. The paper attempts to understand the ways in which transpositions were used to produce representations of several Others that, in turn, contributed to produce different identities in the European context.

Abstract: Abstract: Talking about contemporary scenarios means talking about international ones, with a special focus on the Global crisis. Everyone must go beyond geographic and mental boundaries; design must understand complexity and go beyond disciplinary boundaries by discontinuity, thanks to the transdisciplinary approach. Through cultural and social sustainability it is possible to carry out a concrete action aimed at the creation of a more inclusive society, through the most efficient tools (education and culture) and thanks to the contribution of service-design. Italian Design has the skills to work to a new future challenge: a new way of refuge. Italy is an open-lab, where we can imagine a new way of life for new communities, focusing on individual freedom as a social value. The designer is a medium, his goal is the understanding of the present world and he can plan new proposals by his original bravery.

Abstract: The women’s XXth century philosophical reflections on the disumanization of history clearly still show their relevance for our present. Starting from a tragic episode of our times, such as the genocide in Rwanda in ‘94 – where women had a fundamental role in the reconstruction of the social fabric – this paper wants to analyze the denial of the human in the light of M. Zambrano, E. Hillesum, and H. Arendt’s reflections. Their gendered perspective offers us new interpretative keys, linked to responsibility, relationality, alterity, care, and need for humanisation that allow a re-thinking of tragic politics as an ethical politics.

Abstract: My aim in this paper is to develop an ontology of media operations that is rooted in Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation. I position this media operative ontology in contrast to Bernhard Siegert’s understanding of operative ontology as a cultural technique. Drawing on Wolfgang Ernst, Henri Atlan, and Michel Serres, I argue that Siegert’s position compromises the extra-cultural operationality of technical media, and of techniques more generally, in its bid to redirect media theory from its Kittlerian trajectory. With his theory of information as reception of environmental singularity by a metastable receiver, Simondon provides a mechanism for theorizing how extra-cultural operationality of technical media informs the production of culture and the distinctions upon which it rests, without compromising the alterity of technics.

Abstract: The paper focuses on the alterity of the protagonist as Sherine, Athena and as Hagia Sofia. The paper attempts to psychoanalyze the protagonist and her alterities. The protagonist is the ‘self’ originally named Sherine Khalil, but since she names herself Athena and prefers to be referred to by that name, Athena is considered to be the protagonist’s ‘assumed-self’ while Hagia Sofia becomes the ‘other’. The protagonist assumes the alterity of Athena instead of being Sherine, in order to bring out the courageous and independent side of her. The alterity of Hagia Sofia, on the other hand, is exhibited by the protagonist, only during those circumstances where she attains a trance-like state after celebrating the “Great Mother” through dance and concentration. Hagia Sofia is used as an alterity, to serve the protagonist’s purpose of spreading messages to the gathering in a Spiritual tone.

Abstract: This article investigates a polemic issue between the Brazilian singers Anitta and Pitty during a television show. The polemic was about the feminine behavior in relation to sexuality. The specific objectives are: (i) to verify how alterity and heterogeneity delimit discursive positions; (ii) to analyze a polemic issue and the use of simulacrums in the intercomprehension process; and (iii) to demonstrate that alterity and heterogeneity materialize some conflicts historically legitimated in the context of sexuality. Placed on the French Discourse Analysis, this research applies the theoretical and methodological arsenal based on the assumptions of Jacqueline Authier-Revuz (1990; 1998) about alterity and enunciative heterogeneity. This work also applies Dominique Maingueneau’s reflections (1993; 2005) concerning the primacy of interdiscourse and the polemic as an intercomprehension. The method of analysis is based on the description and interpretation of linguistics expressions (glosses, pronouns, deictics, lexis) that materialize alterity, interdiscourse movements and discourse regulation. In short, the analysis concludes that enunciation is heterogeneously marked and that discursive positions produce polemic situations for it expresses simulacrums, stereotypes and historic conflicts between genders in the context of sexuality.

Abstract: This article aims to analyze the short stories Persistencia (1974) of Jose Adolph, El primer peruano en el espacio (2013) of Daniel Salvo and in the novel De cuando en cuando Saturnina. Una historia oral del futuro (2004) of Alison Spedding, two recurring themes in the history of science fiction: alterity and travel. These are arguments offer a chance to reflect on contemporary Peruvian and Bolivian society. Science fiction becomes a tool for denouncing social inequalities, processes of colonization and can become a space to reflect on the encounter with the other.

Abstract: This paper investigates the temporal meaning of the alterity of the Other in Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality & Infinity and its implications for the recent debate concerning the possibility of a non- anthropocentric extension of Levinas’s ethical philosophy. Through a close reading of sections from Totality & Infinity, I articulate, first, Levinas’s argument that because pre-reflective experience is characterized as an interiorizing jouissance, discourse is the condition of possibility for objectivity, and, second, that this discourse is afforded only by the asymmetrical ethical relationship that Levinas develops as his main thesis. On my argumentation, this asymmetrical ethical relationship is afforded by the diachronic and discontinuous temporality Levinas exposes in his analysis of fecundity. As such, I argue that the alterity of the Other, which, on Levinas’s account, shatters egoist jouissance, is inherently and radically futural. It is my contention that because it is this futural alterity of the Other that calls me into question and inaugurates ethical life, one cannot articulate categorical restrictions on what sort of Other could disturb me in advance or once and for all. As such, and on my argumentation, one need not “extend” Levinas’s account of ethics to include non-human Others, because Totality & Infinity already offers intrinsic provisions for a more-than-human ethics.