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Why [is it] that where literature, life, and memory remind us how significant were those hours, days, years we spent with brothers, sisters and friends, when we put on our academic hats, we forget.
Postmodernism has made us sensitive to the constructions of sameness and difference, the subject and the other. Attention to violence and trauma has made us aware of the way the “other” is the focus of hostility through the human proclivity for projection and representation, or the “other” is created in order to be the hostile object.
For me, personally, the status of the “other” broke somewhat differently on my consciousness, long before postmodernism, when as a student I read Simone de Beauvoir's (1952) The Second Sex and discovered that I was, as a woman, the very site of a primal alterity — woman was the place where (with her connivance) man deposited all that he did not want about the limitations of humanity. The experience was bewildering as it is psychologically impossible to be only and entirely “other” from one's own position. Perhaps it is because of this early sensation that I find the question of “othering” as an abstract concept vertiginous, and my contribution here is consequently prosaic, down-to-earth. I suggest childhood sibling relations are an important place where we negotiate “self” and “other” but also where we, or through whom we, construct the “other” of ourselves, our unconsciousness, the it (or id) which cuts across self and subjecthood, locating us forever elsewhere than in our “selves.”
In opposing the grand narratives of modernism, the postmodern focussed on criticising notions of universality and the concern with origins.