Otherness, Altericide

Abstract

In his book Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation Thomas Docherty implicitly attacks the view of literary texts as friends or allies which informs the ethical criticism discussed in the Introduction. Modern criticism, he argues, is characterized by ‘a fear of Otherness’.¹ Reading is a struggle in which the fragile subjecthood of the critic is strengthened by appropriating and mastering the objects of interpretation; in the process, ‘ostensibly recalcitrant Others’ (1) are annihilated. The ‘imperialism of understanding’ (82) entails a ‘colonization of the space of alterity’ (83). The ethics of criticism which Docherty advocates requires a mode of attentive incomprehension rather than the appropriative understanding which domesticates its object in order to shore up the powers of the subject: ‘The task for the critic who wishes to restore the materiality of a world outside of consciousness … is to find a means of thinking alterity, of constructing a critical philosophy which will eschew the solace of identity — always predictable — in the interests of an alterity for which the subject is precisely unprepared’ (7).