Ourselves as another

cosmopolitical humanities

Peter Pericles Trifonas

pp. 205-220

in: Peter Pericles Trifonas, Michael A. Peters (eds), Deconstructing Derrida, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

Now, more than ever, there is an obligation to recognize the presence of the infinite possibilities and multiple horizons of alterity, which destabilize the grounding of subjectivity and our knowledge about what it means to be human. This responsibility highlights the problem of exposing or creating locations for otherness within communitarian-based institutions such as the university, which still occupy the colonized space of traditional knowledge archives and are at the same time alterior to the logic of the status quo simply by producing new forms of knowledge and blazing trails of discovery that change the disciplines.¹ If so, how and where are gestures toward the spaces of these new locations enacted within the human sciences by which we define the difference of ourselves as another?