Oldal 105 [105]
“The majority of the nation took part in it,
either actively or by saying nothing.
They armed themselves to attacking
the Huguenots, whom
they considered alien and hostile.”
Prosper Merimée
The enemy is the radical concept of the alien. At first glance,
the outer marker, in this case skin color, determines this status,
not that the alien is something who/which is elsewhere, because
otherwise it would be logical. The alien, of course, is usually the
one who is far away or comes from afar. Or not: “here” can also be
far away, which is to say it can be “there”. Spatiality is secondary.
Skin color says so much more, at least at first glance. If we think
about it completely independently of anything else, it really does
seem obvious, that the first apparent sign of the “other” is skin color,
even if I limit the definition of “other” to the “that which has not
been seen before” and do not consider it in its cultural context. The
thinkers of the18" century necessarily use this distinction. After
all, our primary sense is vision: I see that something is different
from me. There is pure empiricism, experience present here, and
there is no question of any cognitive relationship. The intellect