Altérité, Diversité, Différence: Quelques jalons

Abstract

The statement of the research project (Diversity and inclusion, overcoming fragmentation) stems from a current situation: how to combine diversity and inclusion, and how, therefore, to prevent fragmentation? If the questions have an immediately practical (how to?) and local dimension, they also refer to a whole historical, philosophical, religious, political background which comes from far in the history of Europe or of what Europe has become. It is this background that I would like to summon up, focusing on a few moments (for example, the introduction of the Greeks/Barbarians couple), on the setting up of both conceptual and political operators (for example, the 16^th century savage becoming a primitive in the 19^th century and, in the 20^th century, an inhabitant of the underdeveloped, then developing world), by noting certain semantic evolutions (otherness, difference, diversity, racialized, against a background of increasing individualism), as well as the appearance of new concepts or, at least, new uses of these concepts, such as identity, which can form an alliance with difference (the right to be different), with development (since it is conceived in the former colonies as ‘endogenous’) and with heritage (from the most local to the universal). In short, marking some benchmarks and lay some groundwork for a long-lasting conceptual history of the modalities of the relationship between the other and the same.