- otherness, alterity, character - 

"Je est un autre" [I is another] 

(Arthur Rimbaud in letter to Paul Demeny on 15 mai 1871) 

"The true life is absent". "But we are in the world ".
(Emanuel Levinas: Totality and Infinity) 

The first sentence by Levinas is a paraphrase of Rimbaud and the second an allusion to Heidegger, who characterises human life as being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world means that we have needs and wants that we can fulfil and enjoy, and yet there is something that does not fit into this world, it is beyond or rather to big to fit into this world it overflows it. This 'it' is the good, the infinite, the other. 

creation of otherness - step by step

- The distinction between self and other is a primary tool by which we make order out of the chaos of our daily perceptions. 

- The construction of Alterity (Otherness) sees not individuals, but classes and categories. Constructing entire categories of individuals as other than people, other than human, it proposes that other than ourselves = less than ourselves. Victor Frankenstein, character from the movie and the book, constructed "less than human" to equal "sentient individuals in human form created in the laboratory rather than by sexual intercourse." But his creature, at least in the novel, rather than having a tabula rasa for a brain, had an innate language instinct and cognitive intelligence, even though he was never nurtured or given a name. The category of less than human has historically been defined to include different subcategories at different times, using as markers gender, race, class, ethnicity, language, sexuality, national origin, culture, religion, type of intelligence. 

- The construction of Alterity (Otherness) is not the same thing as prejudice or the various "isms"--- for example, racism, sexism, classism. It is an early step in the process by which we create a semblance of social order. First we construct some group as Other. Next we project onto it those qualities we reject, fear, or disown in ourselves. Then we assign qualities to variable human individuals on the basis of their inclusion in this constructed Alterity. Once we take this step in our construction of Alterity (Otherness), then, at last, we have also created prejudice and stereotyping. 

- The final step in the construction of Alterity (Otherness) is to institutionalize these prejudices in our laws and customs. When laws, group culture, educational values, and social custom operate as if prejudices were truths, then we have racism, sexism, classism, anti-semitism. 

In Otherness in Hollywood Cinema, Michael Richardson argues that the Hollywood system has been the only national cinema with the resources and inclination to explore images of others through stories set in exotic and faraway places. He traces many of the ways in which Hollywood has constructed otherness, and discusses the extent to which those images have persisted and conditioned today’s understanding. The book examines a range of genres from the perspective of otherness, including the Western, film noir, and zombie movies and focuses on themes of wilderness, frontier, exotics, night, monsters, borders, sanctification of difference as ways of representing Otherness.