Genuine alterity is reciprocal, whereas mythic Otherness denies reciprocity
Evidence
It is thus true that woman is other than man, and this alterity is concretely felt in desire, embrace, and love; but the real relation is one of reciprocity; as such, it gives rise to authentic dramas: through eroticism, love, friendship, and their alternatives of disappointment, hatred, and rivalry, the relation is a struggle of consciousnesses, each of which wants to be essential, it is the recognition of freedoms that confirm each other, it is the undefined passage from enmity to complicity. To posit the Woman is to posit the absolute Other, without reciprocity, refusing, against experience, that she could be a subject, a peer. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 652
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘struggle of consciousnesses, each of which wants to be essential’ is directly Hegel’s master-slave dialectic applied to gender. — connects to: The for-others requires a totality in which selfness and the Other are reciprocal structures; The totality of for-itself and in-itself differs from for-others by its absence of reciprocity; True alterity requires a conscious peer, not a passive object to consume. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 317 (+9 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: Beauvoir distinguishes legitimate reciprocal alterity (felt in desire and love) from the mythic absolute Other—a genuinely dense distinction separating her feminism from both Hegel and from essentialist feminism.
Broader Connections
- The negation relation with the Other is reciprocal unlike that with things
#corroborates(0.90) - Denying shared humanity creates non-relation rather than strangeness within a group
#expands(0.85) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 400 - The Other is constituted by negation as the self which is not myself
#qualifies(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 675 - Specularizing Otherness normalizes killing the racialized enemy.
#expands(0.80) - Orientalist assumptions about Otherness enabled the Iraq invasion
#exemplifies(0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 33 - The gothic’s construction of evil is an empty category of pure Otherness.
#exemplifies(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 633 - New World monsters were projections of anxieties about Otherness, not observed reality.
#exemplifies(0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 582