IN Ich und die Anderen: wie die neue Pluralisierung uns alle verändert (I and the Others: How New Pluralization Changes Us All, 2018), the Austrian philosopher Isolde Charim considers how the contemporary psycho-political moment in Austria, Germany, and Europe relates to notions of social diversification and pluralization. While immigration to Austria has been the topic of recent studies, Charim illuminates in more conceptual ways what is at stake regarding contemporary identity in diverse communities. As the first section of this article shows, her philosophical treatment of the relation between self and other, similitude and difference, diversity and universals, opens up ways of interpreting contemporary visual culture as an arena for negotiating changing conceptions of identity. In the second section I link Wolfgang Fischer's film STYX (2018), one of several recent Austrian and European films that take the so-called “migrant crisis” as their subject matter, to Charim's philosophy to argue that both texts use notions of pluralization, openness to alterity, incommensurability, and difference to reflect contemporary political concerns.

Scholars in the social sciences have recently coined the term “postmigrant” to describe the specific characteristics of diverse European societies and some have hailed “postmigration” as a new turn in cultural studies. As a hermeneutic methodology “postmigrant studies” stresses the importance of renegotiating the norm/anomaly, majority/minority divide and re-thinking concepts of integration, belonging, Heimat, and identity to better reflect contemporary “postnational,” “postcolonial,” or “postracial” societies. German sociologist Naika Foroutan coined the term “postmigrant society” to denote a society transformed by migration, the prefix “post” reflecting the state that comes “after the end” of predominant notions of homogeneity. For Foroutan and other sociologists working in this field, contemporary Germany is a de facto plural nation wherein “minority groups” are part and parcel of society. Neither Charim nor Fischer use the word “postmigrant,” but here I use “postmigrant” as associated with Charim's term “pluralized” to read her philosophy and Fischer's film in terms of their explorations of the effects of heterogeneity and relationality on individual identity. The idea that differences cannot be assimilated into sameness, and thus require us to reconceptualize identity and modes of belonging, underpin both texts.