Although otherness has long been an essential subject in our human and social sciences, particularly in our Western philosophies and anthropologies, the word itself is nonetheless the object of many real or imaginary and sometimes contradictory meanings. The aim of this article is to take a fresh look at a concept that needs to be revisited in the light of its contemporary uses and misuses. In particular, the aim is to understand how and why this concept attracts a number of misunderstandings and false fads, in contrast to what Sartre, in his time, called authenticity. By positing, and discussing, the self as profoundly other, both subject and object of experience, we will attempt to show that otherness does not reside so much in the other as in its very impossibility, insofar as it is pure exchange, infinite interactions, not given as a starting point, but given as a destination. Taking up the Levi Straussian perspective of Tristes Tropiques, this article proposes to think of otherness as that which constantly escapes us, that ontological failure by which the search for the grasp of the world, and of those who compose and inhabit it, imposes itself on us in the form of the impasse and the inaccessible. The world appears to us only insofar as it is ungraspable. So it is with what language calfs the other. Philosophers and anthropologists help us to understand that in seeking the other, we find only ourselves seeking the other. It is in this perpetual tension, this conatus so well defined by Spinoza, that we find what we call otherness. The good news is that at the end of this reflection we will understand that otherness exists, even and especially when it is denied. This is what the work of Frantz Fanon will point to in this context, as he shows that the highest otherness arises from the very negation of the otherness of the dominated. lt is by withdrawing from the incessantly minoritised other (woman, black person, foreigner, mentally il! person, poor person, homosexual) his or her part of being, that his or her irreducible otherness is conferred, in the same gesture and in the same movement. To think is to establish a relationship of similarity and difference. Ail thought is thought of the gap and it is in the microphysics (Foucault) of this gap that the other stands, miserable and munificent at the same time.