• ADVENTURES IN ALTERITY

    GOD, SEX AND OTHER PEOPLE

    A short history of "Otherness"--an invaluable concept if you find yourself struggling to make small talk on the academic conference circuit. By Philip Davis, a professor of English literature at Liverpool University, and editor of the Reader magazine...

    From our arts blog, MOREOVER

    The academic conference season is ending here in England. If you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in such a setting, you only need one word to get by. The word is "Otherness", and it has been in tarnished vogue for some time now. If you are feeling really out of place, then try saying "Alterity" as well. Means the same, sounds even better. You sit in a conference room and you hear so many of these notional terms replacing the reality they purport to describe.

    I was brought up in Nottingham, home of D.H. Lawrence, in the English Midlands. When I was a boy, I am afraid that "the Other", in crude slang, meant Sexual Intercourse. As in: "I fancy a bit of the other."

    When I next came across the word, at university in Cambridge, it meant God. God was the Other, utterly beyond any anthropomorphic terms of understanding. Anything you can say about God, said the 14th-century mystic Meister Eckhart, is untrue.
      read more »


    COMMENTS: 4 | ADD NEW COMMENT