The other is so in excess of anything you can understand or grasp or reduce, this in itself creates an ethical relatedness, a relation without relation, because you can’t presume to know or grasp the other. The minute you think you know the other you’re ready to kill them. You think, ‘Oh, they’re doing this and this. They’re the axis of evil. Let’s drop some bombs.’ But if you don’t know, you don’t understand this alterity, it’s so other that you can’t violate it with your sense of understanding, then you have to let it live in some sense.

— Avital Ronell