IN Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee’s haunting novel about colonisation, corporeality, and betrayal, the ‘civilised’ protagonist thinks about a ‘barbarian’ ex-lover. “The body of the other one,” muses the Magistrate, “seems beyond comprehension … I cannot imagine what ever drew me to that alien body.”

This reflection pithily conveys several suggestions about what is often termed the Other. Imperialists — including those operating in what British geographer Derek Gregory calls the “colonial present” of Af-Pak and the Middle East — construct an Other who is different from the Self. Colonisers simultaneously feel desire and repulsion for this figure of their own

creation. The Magistrate was once drawn to the dark, imperturbable body of the barbarian girl, and tenderly washed her feet and torture wounds. Now, locked in the embrace of a prostitute from his own racial background, he rejects his former lover as alien and unknowable.

Similarly, in his book Colonial Desire, Robert Young argues that although on paper racists want to keep different cultures apart, their hatred moves into the new key of desire. These apparent purists are surreptitiously obsessed with “transgressive, inter-racial sex, hybridity, and miscegenation”. The notion of the Other originated in psychoanalysis, was developed by existentialists and feminists, and has found particular traction in the field of postcolonial studies. Psychoanalysts deploy the term to describe how we become conscious of our identities. In Jacques Lacan’s work on the mirror stage, for example, he analyses how a child peers in the looking glass, sees itself in the mother’s arms, and becomes aware that it is a separate being. The Other — in this case the mother — is crucial in delimiting the child’s sense of self.

Existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre used the word differently, to illustrate how individuals fashion their lives and identities through their actions towards and relationships with others. Influenced by existentialism, Sartre’s partner Simone de Beauvoir distils the significance of this idea for women. In her feminist classic The Second Sex, she asserts that man “is the Subject, he is the Absolute” while woman “is the Other.”

Another notable philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, emphasises that the Self should be held accountable for the Other. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas refers to “my responsibility for the faults or the misfortune of others ... my responsibility that answers for the freedom of another.”

Finally, postcolonialism has again redefined this noun. Published in 1961, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was prefaced by Sartre’s fiery, if somewhat simplistic foreword. In the book itself, the Martinican psychiatrist turned Algerian revolutionary Fanon pluralises the term, examining how “others” turn to violence, “sharpening their weapons” as they reject “the governing race’s” construction of them as animalistic.

In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said avers that non-Western peoples — Arabs, Asians, and Africans — have been for centuries treated as the Other. The racial Other is usually painted in disparaging, unfamiliar hues. Her consciousness is wired differently, and she is somehow violent and threatening, weak and contemptible, at one and the same time. In colonial discourse, even apparent admiration for the Other functions to mask exoticisation and structural inequality. Said observes that imperialists apply binary oppositions in depicting the Self and the Other, reinforcing the Self’s sense of superiority. Non-Western people are seen as being instinctive, while Europeans are rational; ‘the Rest’ are portrayed as ‘barbaric’, while ‘the West’ is civilised.

From their different disciplinary and political vantage points, these pioneering theorists show that we achieve selfhood by calibrating ourselves against what we are not, amid unequal power relations. As Gregory puts it: “modernity produces its other, verso to recto, as a way of at once producing and privileging itself.” It is easier to view yourself as an individual if there is someone present who shares some traits with you, but is different enough that you can feel superior.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay ‘Terror: A Speech After 9-11’ concerns the ‘War on Terror’ and its ethical consequences. Writing in 2004, she outlines the already existing responses to the World Trade Centre attacks and their aftermath, asking what an ideal reaction would look like “in the face of the impossibility of response”. As well as dealing with the Self versus the Other, she also employs plural pronouns to challenge George W. Bush and others, whom she characterises as constantly “us-and-them-ing”. Spivak maintains that we need humanities training in imagining Others’ point of view. She advocates the difficult but crucial task of “listen[ing] to the other as if it were a self, neither to punish nor to acquit.” This Other includes the suicide bomber, whose motivations she controversially explores but does not endorse. Spivak claims that without at least attempting to understand the Other’s rationale for his actions, all our juridical and political work will prove futile and impermanent.

A few years later, Gregory wrote The Colonial Present to evaluate what happens to notions of Self and Other, us and them in times of war. He zeroes in on the three neocolonial contexts of Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan. By dehumanising the populations of these nations, modern-day colonisers are able to detonate remote missiles — resulting in devastation for ‘them’ and impunity for ‘us’:

“American bombs and missiles rained down on K-A-B-U-L, not on the eviscerated city of Kabul; Israeli troops turned their guns on Palestinian ‘targets’ not on Palestinian men, women, and children; American firepower destroyed Baghdad buildings and degraded the Iraqi military machine but never killed Iraqis.” This exemplifies what Gregory calls “connective dissonance”. Through abstractions like the word ‘targets’, an imagined geography of us and them is created, in which some connections between peoples are exaggerated, while others are “disavowed”. Instead of finding alternatives to this dissonance, groups like Al Qaeda and the militant Islamic State simply flip the hate-filled binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ on their head. The devastating consequences of this dehumanisation of the Other were seen again in the recent attacks on Beirut and Paris.

French-Bulgarian structuralist Tzvetan Todorov abjures pronouns altogether in order to explore another duality, between ‘civilised people’ and ‘barbarians’. That barbarians are said to be ‘at the gate’ is really a way of demarcating the Self and its boundaries. Todorov does not doubt that civilisation and barbarism exist. Yet he rejects the way the Ancient Greeks and others up until the present day formulate these terms to cast ‘us’ in a positive light and denigrate those who live differently.

Instead, he provides a powerfully simple definition of barbarians as “those who deny the full humanity of others”. Todorov delves into the psychology of the barbarian who behaves as though others were not fully human by torturing them. Throughout The Fear of Barbarians, he shows that fighting Manichean binaries and violence with Manichean binaries and violence can never succeed. Todorov plangently explains, “The fear of barbarians is what risks making us barbarian”.

Accused by his own people of “treasonously consorting with the enemy,” Coetzee’s Magistrate protests that they are supposed to be at peace and have no enemies. At this moment in Waiting for the Barbarians the Self and Other binary breaks down, as the Magistrate goes on to ponder, “Unless we are the enemy”. Perhaps the Other, which the Self fashions into a monstrous ‘barbarian’, is actually a glimpse of one’s own face in the mirror.

CLAIRE CHAMBERS teaches global literature at the University of York and is the author of Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780-1988.