The Seba library treats Alterity in 8 passages, across 7 authors (including Frank, Arthur W., Derrida, Jacques, Han, Byung-Chul).
help from the other ego whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation?... For pure suffering, which is intrinsically meaningless and condemned to itself without exit, a beyond takes shape in the inter-human.
Frank, citing Levinas, argues that the alterity of the other ego — its irreducible exteriority — is the precise condition that opens the possibility of salvation and meaning beyond solitary, meaningless suffering.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis
if the source is always other, the alterity of the source, in the case of the mystic or the hallucinated, is of an other alterity; it is no longer the source which 'normally' divides and constitutes the I
Derrida, reading Valéry on Swedenborg, distinguishes between the ordinary alterity that constitutes the self and the radical, anomalous alterity of the mystic's source, which exceeds the normal economy of self-constitution.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
Harm does not come from negativity alone, but also from positivity — not just from the Other or the foreign, but also from the Same.
Han contends that contemporary neuronal pathologies arise not from the traumatic encounter with alterity but from the suffocating dominance of the Same, diagnosing the elimination of productive otherness as the structural cause of burnout.
, The Burnout Society, 2010thesis
whose duality is necessary but comportes no alterity, two aspects of the same absolute haqiqa, co-existing the one through the other
Corbin describes the Sufi metaphysical relation between the divine and creation as a necessary duality that nonetheless involves no genuine alterity, being rather two aspects of a single absolute reality in symbolic co-inherence.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
the Self, distinguished henceforth from the I by virtue of the idea of the assignment of responsibility... Testimony is therefore the mode of truth of this auto-exhibition of the Self, the inverse of the certainty of the ego.
Ricoeur, engaging Levinas, shows how the self constituted through the other's assignation stands in inverse relation to Cartesian ego-certainty, making the encounter with alterity the ground of testimonial selfhood.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the impossibility for a present, for the presence of a present, to present itself as a source: simple, actual, punctual, instantaneous. The implex is a complex of the present always enveloping the nonpresent and the other present
Derrida locates in Valéry's concept of the 'implex' a structural argument that every source of presence is already divided by the nonpresent and the other, making pure self-identity impossible.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Self-awareness, Temporality, and Alterity
A bibliographic citation to Zahavi's edited volume on self-awareness and alterity signals the importance of this concept within the phenomenological study of time-consciousness and embodied selfhood.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside
alterity see otherness
Benveniste's index cross-references alterity to otherness, indicating the term's equivalence in his linguistic-semiotic framework without elaborating its theoretical content.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside