Otherness - Part 2

Where the first episode of our two-part series on "otherness" looked to infancy and to our essential nature to understand the other and othering, this second part considers societal sources of our tendency to subjugate those different from us.  We don't simply project what is shameful in ourselves into the foreign, such that it gets incorporated in the culture and exploited by leaders. Our reactions to otherness seep down into us via the culture in the first place. In this view, the structure of the mind repeats the politics of the world as much as vice versa. To tell the story, we have drawn from original interviews with psychoanalysts Jessica Benjamin, Cynthia Chalker, George Makari, Donna Orange, Eyal Rozmarin, John Riker, Robert Stolorow and Koichi Togashi, as well as from interviews with the philosopher Shaun Gallagher and cultural critic L.M Sacasas.

Topics Covered in this episode: The Still Face experiment, the Moral Third, Fanon’s phenomenology, the origin of the term Xenophobia, Israel-Palestine, States of Exception, Levinas and the Face, Alienated Recognition, Walter Lippmann and the birth of the stereotype, and much more!