ABSTRACT
What is at stake when we encounter the knowledge of others, the reasoning of the other? Sartre once said that hell is other people and, to a large extent, the turbulent history of western civilisation has confirmed his dire ontological assessment. Recognising others is a thorny issue and even a brief look at the history of our relations to otherness will show that it has provoked fear and segregation, domination, exclusion and violence. Our tendency to construct the other in negative terms is evident in social practices, in everyday life, in the media, in institutions, some of which built exclusively to segregate and discipline the other: think about the trajectory of our relations to the mad, to deviants, to remote peoples; think about the nature of extreme intergroup conflict, the conquest of the Americas and the colonial experience. Behind all these cases, we find a set of representations, attitudes and practices that consistently fail to take into account the perspective of the other; we tend to snigger at, belittle and even dehumanise people who fail to be just like us. It is a state of affairs that betrays not only the amount of negative value in the knowledge self holds about different others; it also reveals how self, by the same token, devalues, rejects and in extreme cases sets out to destroy the knowledge of the other.
