The nauseating black hole within our everyday self-satisfactions.

To acknowledge the otherness of others is to recognise them as exceeding the limits of our own experience, and hence to confront a nauseating black hole within our everyday self-satisfactions. 


The subjectivity of others is essentially ‘impenetrable’, and ‘radically refractory’ to our understanding. ‘No consciousness can even conceive of a consciousness other than itself,’ Sartre said. We cannot understand others, because if we did we would have destroyed their otherness.