Done and Over With—Finally? Otherness, Metonymy, and the Ethics of Comparison

Abstract

A strange impatience characterizes recent debates surrounding not only comparative literature but also related fields such as recognition, ethics, postcolonialism, and cultural studies: the impatience with notions like alterity, difference, and the other. These notions have enjoyed an unprecedented (and presumably undue) amount of attention for roughly thirty-five years, but now many commentators are eager to lay to rest their spectral presence or to shoo them away like a bothersome insect. Among the most recent and resolute attempts to overcome the “excesses” of the turn toward the other is arguably the oeuvre of Jacques Rancière, who forges an analogy between the cynical foreign policy of the Bush government, including its “war on terror,” and an ethics of otherness—an ethics usually based on concepts of the sublime and linked by Rancière to the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Giorgio Agamben (Dissensus). Rancière repeatedly insists that what is often called the absolutization of the other can lead to, or at least feed into, political forms of “othering” that threaten to achieve the opposite of what they were designed to do. However, any such attempt to end the interlude of otherness—and to return to a concept of universalism or the human, however modified—means to return to sameness.