The otherness of the other. Alterity refers to both the quality of strangeness inherent in the other and the fact of their strangeness. Strangeness here means simply that neither our prior knowledge nor our prior experience prepares us for the encounter with this other. For Levinas, Emmanuel, the Paris-based Lithuanian philosopher and ethicist who established the concept, the only being capable of fully satisfying these conditions is God. His notion of ethics revolves around the idea that one should open oneself to an encounter with the divine Mystery, that is, the alterity, of God as other. This notion has also been used in anthropology, particularly by Michael Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity (1993), as a way of thinking about the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. It has also been used in psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between the self and the other, namely that part of ourselves (such as the abject) that we disavow.