The Ethics of Resistance by Drew M. Dalton

Author:Drew M. Dalton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

The alterity of the Other

According to Hans-Dieter Gondek, the Other in Lacan must be understood not as some person, this or that other, but as “first of all faceless.”19 “The Other,” he argues, “is a site. The Other only obtains a face when someone actually inhabits this place, for instance the mother, or an ‘exemplar’ of the opposite sex.”20 The Other for Lacan is thus not someone, though someone may at times inhabit the symbolic space occupied by the Other. Nevertheless, the Other in itself represents something larger than any single person: a superstructure or network in which every singular person participates, and even creates, without ever fully controlling or mastering individually. To understand this distinction between the singular others which make up the Other and the Other properly, Sean Homer suggests distinguishing between the lowercase “o” other of individual identities and the uppercase “O” Other which grounds and structures subjective life as the unconscious. According to Homer, while the lowercase “o” other refers to specific others, other subjects with “faces,” for example my mother, neighbor, or colleague, “the big Other, on the other hand, is that absolute otherness that we cannot assimilate to our subjectivity.”21 This distinction, suggests Homer, serves to underscore Lacan’s point that the unconscious force which structures subjective life is not only outside of and beyond the subject itself; it furthermore cannot be located within any particular person, place, or thing. It is absolutely outside the scope of perception.

Lacan of course suggests as much himself, arguing that “we must distinguish two others, at least two—an other with a capital O, and an other with a small o, which is the ego.”22 It is the latter, capital O Other, according to Lacan, which “is already there in every opening, however fleeting it may be, of the unconscious.”23 Thus, thinks Lacan, “it is only in th[is] Other that the subject is constituted as ideal.”24 That is, it is only in an Other so ot her that it cannot even be isolated, identified with, or located in any specific other that the subject is grounded. Thus, claims Lacan, “the unconscious, which I represent to you as that which is inside the subject [as that which is the subject’s own-most] . . . can be realized only outside, that is to say, in the locus of the Other in which alone it may assume its status.”25 What “we are dealing with” in Lacan is, in other words, as Lorenzo Chiesa puts it, a “transindividual unconscious that differs from both intrasubjectivity, the unconscious as the ‘Other who is within me,’ and intersubjectivity, the unconscious of the Other subject.”26

What we discover in Lacan’s account of the Other qua “transindividual unconsciousness” is a ground of subjective life which is totally non-relational—which is, in other words, located absolutely and radically beyond itself. Nevertheless, argues Lacan, it is this absolutely non-relational power which structures the nature and life of the subject. “The Other is,” Lacan writes, “the locus in which is constituted the I who

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