From The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other by Tzvetan Todarov:

My subject—the discovery self makes of the other—is so enormous that any general formulation soon ramifies into countless categories and directions. We can discover the other in ourselves, realize we are not a homogenous substance, radically alien to whatever is not is: as Rimbaud said, Je est un autre. But others are also "I"s: subjects just as I am, whom only my point of view—according to which all of them are out there and I alone am in here—separates and authentically distinguishes from myself. I can conceive of these others as an abstraction, as an instance of any individual's psychic configuration, as the Other—other in relation to myself, to me; or else as a specific social group to which we do not belong. This group in turn can be interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the "normal"; or it can be exterior to society, i.e., another society which will be near or far away, depending on the cases: beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown qualities, outsiders whose languages and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own. It is this problematics of the exterior and remote other that I have chosen—somewhat arbitrarily and because one cannot speak of everything all at once—in order to open an investigation that can never be closed.

†