Only those who possess a strong Individuality can feel the Difference.
By virtue of the law: every thinking subject supposes an object, we must posit that the notion of Difference immediately implies an individual starting point.
That such will fully taste the wonderful feeling, who will feel what they are and what they are not.
Exoticism is therefore not this kaleidoscopic state of the tourist and the mediocre spectator, but the lively and curious reaction to the choice of a strong individuality against an objectivity whose distance it perceives and tastes. (The sensations of Exoticism and Individualism are complementary).
Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation; is therefore not the perfect comprehension of an outside oneself that one would embrace within oneself, but the acute and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility.
Let us therefore start from this confession of impenetrability. Do not flatter ourselves that we assimilate customs, races, nations, others; but, on the contrary, let us rejoice in never being able to do so; thus reserving for us the durability of the pleasure of feeling the Diverse. (It is here that this doubt could be placed: to increase our faculty of perceiving the Diverse, is it to shrink our personality or to enrich it? Is it to steal something from it or to make it more numerous? No doubt: it is enrich it abundantly, with the whole Universe. Clouard says very well: “This naturalism, we see that it is not our abasement, nor our dispersion, nor an advantage that nature would obtain at the expense of the human personality, it is the enlarged empire of our mind over the world.”).
Victor Segalen , Essay on exoticism, an aesthetic of diversity . Editions Fata Morgana.