tamise van pelt otherness

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Otherness Tamise Van Pelt Idaho State University [email protected] © 2000 Tamise Van Pelt. 1. As half of a signifying binary, the "Other" is a term with a rich and lengthy philosophical history dating at least from Plato's Sophist, in which the Stranger participates in a dialogue on the ontological problems of being and non-being, of the One and the Other.[1] In the twentieth century, this Platonic mix of ontology with alterity informs the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who is countered by Simone de Beauvoir, who influences feminist philosophers, who influence theorists of political, racial, and sexual identity--forming a great chain of inquiry into being.[2] Additional philosophical perspectives on Otherness abound, and Hegel (via Kojève), Heidegger, and Sartre all present important statements on alterity. In this century, Jacques Lacan's place in the history of alterity is unique, however, because Lacan insists on a decentering of Otherness that parallels his much-discussed decentering of the Subject. Specifically, Lacan explores an intrapsychic Otherness different from the Other of interpersonal theories of identity and distinct from the philosophical problem of Other Minds—a problem grounded in solipsism rather than narcissism. 2. Unlike his contemporaries, Lacan postulates a gap between an Other and an other that echoes a gap between the Subject and the ego. These twin decenterings imply Lacan's symbolic and imaginary registers, since the "decentering of the Subject" is another way of saying that the Subject and the ego inhabit disjunct registers. Likewise, the disjunction between the symbolic linguistic Other and the imaginary mirroring other signifies a decentering of the former from the latter. Taken together, these two decenterings articulate a post- humanist subjectivity at odds with contemporary constructions of the "Other" as a person, particularly a

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Page 1: Tamise Van Pelt Otherness

Otherness

Tamise Van PeltIdaho State [email protected]

© 2000 Tamise Van Pelt.

1. As half of a signifying binary, the "Other" is a term with a rich and lengthy philosophical history dating at least from Plato's Sophist, in which the Stranger participates in a dialogue on the ontological problems of being and non-being, of the One and the Other.[1] In the twentieth century, this Platonic mix of ontology with alterity informs the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who is countered by Simone de Beauvoir, who influences feminist philosophers, who influence theorists of political, racial, and sexual identity--forming a great chain of inquiry into being.[2] Additional philosophical perspectives on Otherness abound, and Hegel (via Kojève), Heidegger, and Sartre all present important statements on alterity. In this century, Jacques Lacan's place in the history of alterity is unique, however, because Lacan insists on a decentering of Otherness that parallels his much-discussed decentering of the Subject. Specifically, Lacan explores an intrapsychic Otherness different from the Other of interpersonal theories of identity and distinct from the philosophical problem of Other Minds—a problem grounded in solipsism rather than narcissism.

2. Unlike his contemporaries, Lacan postulates a gap between an Other and an other that echoes a gap between the Subject and the ego. These twin decenterings imply Lacan's symbolic and imaginary registers, since the "decentering of the Subject" is another way of saying that the Subject and the ego inhabit disjunct registers. Likewise, the disjunction between the symbolic linguistic Other and the imaginary mirroring other signifies a decentering of the former from the latter. Taken together, these two decenterings articulate a post-humanist subjectivity at odds with contemporary constructions of the "Other" as a person, particularly a person who is marginal or subversive in some way. This conceptual disjunction between theories of a humanized Other and Lacan's radically alterior Otherness suggests a gap between the two approaches. Ironically, though, discussions that humanize the Other frequently cite Lacan, so it seems valuable to ask why.

3. Lacan's rhetoric in and of itself invites his readers to overlook his decentering of the Other. Sometimes Lacan refers to the symbolic Other as the big Other and the imaginary other as the little other, but for the most part Lacan simply uses capitalization to distinguish the Other from the other. Though no reader would misread "Subject" for "ego," the much subtler rhetorical distinction between "Other" and "other" can easily be missed--especially if readers don't supplement the explicit discourse of alterity with the implicit discourse of the registers. Since Lacan discusses the Other topically without any explicit reference to the registers, his readers are often called upon to supply the implicit theoretical context. Envision the fate of the casual reader of Lacan who, interested in British literature, picks up Seminar VII on ethics to read "Courtly Love as Anamorphosis." This reader sees: "In many cases, it seems that a function like that of a blessing or salutation is for the courtly lover the supreme gift, the sign of the Other as such, and nothing more" (152). Lacking the implied but unspecified discursive context of the registers, this reader can easily take Lacan's

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"sign of the Other" to be a token received from an "Other" person. Only familiarity with Lacan's theory of the registers allows his reader to grasp the intrapsychic "sign of the Other" as a decentering connection with the signifier in the unconscious that the courtly lover mis/takes for transcendence. Similarly, when Lacan writes in Seminar II that "the obsessional is always an other" he is talking about the obsessional's ego-involvement, not the obsessional's loss of identity. Again, Lacan's point assumes the registers, allying the obsessional with the rhetorically explicit "other" and alienating the obsessional from the discursively implicit "Other." Lacking the framework of the theory of the registers, a reader would be hard pressed to unravel either of these Lacanian invocations of alterity.

4. The currency of the idea of the Other in theory generally makesthe reading of the decentered Other in Lacan even moredifficult. The contemporary idea of the Other rooted in areastudies inscribes itself in theories of race, class, and genderand reinscribes itself in post-colonial theories of nationalidentities, both placed and displaced. Consequently, a plethoraof critical discourses use the term "Other" to signify quitedifferently than Lacan. In identity politics, the decentering ofthe Subject can lead to an equal and opposite reaction: acentering--an entification--of the Other as object, an "it"denied the status of a "Thou." Thus, readers familiar withtheoretical discourses defining Otherness as race or class orgender or nationality see Otherness as attribute rather thanalterity.

5. Since alterity is crucial to an understanding of LacanianOtherness, and since the Other of contemporary theory means manythings to many discourses, it will be useful first todistinguish the Other of identity theories from the decenteredOther of Lacanian analysis. With this Lacanian decentering ofthe Other in mind, I then want to explore the way two theoristsof identity deploy Lacanian Otherness: Abdul R. JanMohamed usesthe registers that distinguish otherness from Otherness in hisreading of colonialist novels; Judith Butler disputes thevalidity of the distinction between the registers on whichLacan's decentering of the Other is based. In dialogue withtheories of identity, Lacanian theory insists on the radicalityof Otherness, an alterity that has frequently been obscured bythe residual humanism implicit in the construction of theSubject as a political entity. Finally, this overview ofOtherness will examine the relationship between the decenteringof the Other and phallic discourse to argue the value of apolitics that listens for the Other rather than speaking on itsbehalf.

The Other in Theories of Identity

6. Many contemporary theories of identity use the Other as half ofa Self/Other dichotomy distinguishing one person from another.

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For instance, pointing out an oppositional racial distinction,Terry Goldie's "The Representation of the Indigene" states: "Atleast since Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) it has been acommonplace to use 'Other' and 'not-self' for the white view ofblacks and for the resulting black view of themselves" (233).[3]Racial selves rather than subjects are at issue here in Goldie'sdistinction between white people and black people. The sameinterpersonal dichotomy of race appears in Abdul R. JanMohamed's"The Economy of Manichean Allegory":

Troubled by the nagging contradiction between thetheoretical justification of exploitation and the barbarityof its actual practice, [colonialist fiction] also attemptsto mask the contradiction by obsessively portraying thesupposed inferiority and barbarity of the racial Other,thereby insisting on the profound moral difference betweenself and Other. (23)

Here, an implicit humanism enters the anti-humanist discourse onrace, imported by the idea of the racial "self." Similarly,Goldie discusses the racial distinctions between the Self andthe Other in terms of specific attributes, saying that"[p]resumably the first instance in which one human perceivedanother as Other in racial terms came when the first recognizedthe second as different in colour, facial features, language"(235). Now Goldie makes the previously implicit humanismexplicit, but not without reason. In critiques that exploreinhumanity, humanizing the Other makes a political statement.This statement, in turn, reminds us that the discourse ofpolitical rights and the discourse of humanism are twinintellectual legacies, two branches of the tree of Enlightenmentknowledge.

7. Discourses of gendered selves parallel discourses of racialidentity in the tendency to humanize the Other. Thus, a paralleldistinction appears in feminist discourses discussing woman asOther, particularly those discourses opposing patriarchy. Wherepolitical rights are at issue, discourses refer both to woman asan Other human being and to the Subject as a political entity, atheoretical move that unifies the "Subject" as a personsubjected to the law of the land. For instance, adopting thelanguage of oppositional feminism, Raman Selden[4] generalizesabout feminist theory: "In many different societies, women, likecolonised subjects, have been relegated to the position of'other', 'colonised' by various forms of patriarchal domination"(249). Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex emphasizes thehumanism that is at stake in the Self/Other dichotomy, writingof the Biblical Genesis: "... humanity is male and man defineswoman not in herself but as relative to him... He is theSubject, he is the Absolute--she is the Other" (xxii); this

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"expression of a duality... of the Self and the Other" issocially and historically pervasive, de Beauvoir points out(xxii). Of de Beauvoir's and Virginia Woolf's feminisms, Seldencontinues: "Being dispersed among men, women have no separatehistory, no natural solidarity; nor have they combined as otheroppressed groups have. Woman is riveted into a lop-sidedrelationship with man: he is the 'One', she the 'Other'... and,à la Virginia Woolf's 'looking glass', the assumption of womanas 'Other' is further internalised by women themselves" (210).Here, Selden's analysis of the woman's internalization of herattributes parallels Goldie's analysis of black identificationabove, and both invoke a discourse on Otherness that hasPlatonic rather than psychoanalytic roots.

8. National identity, too, presents itself in terms of Selves andOthers, adopting the plural construction characteristic ofdiscourses about identity. Here, Homi Bhabha discusses thepost-colonial condition: "[The Derridean entre] makes itpossible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist,histories of the 'people'. It is in this space that we will findthose words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others"("Cultural Diversity" 209). Similarly, Xiaomei Chen concludes adiscussion of "Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse" with thefollowing analysis that treats East and West as implicit humanagents:

... it seems imperative that we at least attempt to find areasonable balance between Self and Other, between East andWest, so that no culture is fundamentally privileged overits Others. Perhaps the realities of history cannot allowsuch a balance to be fully realized. Indeed, it is evennecessary to affirm that these master tropes arenecessarily veiled by the fictional. What must be stressedhere is then even imagining such a balance--surely one ofthe first requirements of a new order of things--can neverbe possible without each Self being confronted by an Other,or by the Other being approached from the point of view ofthe Self in its own specific historical and culturalconditions. (89)

The idea here, that Otherness is both agentic and a matter ofpoint of view, is taken up by Judith Butler in a discussion ofsexual identity when she writes in Bodies that Matter that "gayand lesbian identity positions... constitute themselves throughthe production and repudiation of a heterosexual Other" (112).As Butler's analysis shows, Otherness can be relative, makingthe interpersonal dichotomy of Self and Other endlesslyreversible.

9. Judith Butler's critique of the "exclusionary logic" of the

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Other as it signifies in the Self/Other binary of identitypoints toward the limited usefulness of oppositionalconstructions. Lacanian logic, moreover, demonstrates theintrapsychic resistance that manifests when just such signifyingbinaries as white/black, West/East, or heterosexual/homosexualmerge with a fixed, imaginary ego identity. Like intrapsychicresistance, political resistance has a use, particularly wherebrute survival is at issue. However, resistance denies theepistemological fact that in order to replicate the Self/Othersignifying difference--in order to shape a foundational symbolicdistinction--both terms necessarily implicate each other. Inmany of the discussions above, Chen's "fundamental privilege" isless the issue than foundational, epistemological privilege.Civilized, superior Western white male heterosexual colonizersare foundationally privileged; we know in advance and withoutappeal to specific circumstance or historical context that thisis so. Foundational difference makes a truth claim about theworld; foundational difference prescribes positions, inscribeshierarchy, proscribes recombination. In and of themselves, suchdifferences are descriptive at best, their insistent fixityrendering them insufficient for the analysis of dynamicproblems, whether the problems are intrapsychic, social, orpolitical. Discourses that align the Other with the marginal orwith the subversive avoid a confrontation with complexity, justas JanMohamed's exemplary redistribution of the attribute of"barbarity" from colonizer to colonized, above, stops short ofan inquiry into ego identification as a transitive process.Allied binaries and binary realignments only build a thickerepistemological foundation.

10. Thick epistemology is vulnerable epistemology. As JanMohamed'sportable barbarity points out above, multiple binaries align andrealign, attributes can be assigned and reassigned. Infelicitouscombinatories undermine foundational privilege, whether theclaim of privilege operates as an entitlement or an accusation.So long as there is an investment in the foundational signifyingdifference, the emergence of the combinatory's undesirableelements will arouse resistance. For instance, Melville Chater'spaean to the new South African Union in a 1931 edition of TheNational Geographic sets up and reinforces a typical colonialistfoundational distinction between hard-working, intelligentwhites entitled to the prosperity they enjoy and lazy,superstitious blacks (who presumably have what they have"earned" as well). When Chater's foray over the veldt discoversa "forlorn scene" of "dismal shacks, where some frowzy men andwomen and a plethora of dull-faced children [lounge] in thesunshine," he rescues his foundations: "Yet they [are] whites,or, rather, 'poor white,' representing a South African aspect ofthat retrogressive type which is found in many lands" (441).When this relativizing of whiteness seems inadequate to explain

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"so formidable a number as 120,000 to 150,000" poor whites,Chater attributes the deterioration of the poor whites to "thattoo-easeful existence, based on slave help and game aplenty"(441). Having inadvertently tainted the white superiority he hasconstructed as the outcome of white hard work by the insertionof slavery into his discourse, Chater reasserts his foundation:in a stunning attempt to purify white superiority, heredistributes a poor white squatter to the black half of hisequation by comparing the squatter's language to that of "theAmerican 'black-face' comedian"(441). Chater's inadvertentdenaturalizing of blackness has stumbled upon a blacknessconstructed by whites for white entertainment. He has enteredthe territory of the combinatory of combinatories, the Lacanianunconscious--the Lacanian Other.

11. A more contemporary and purposeful recuperation of race from thestasis of foundational difference is effected by Hondurancomedian Carlos Mencia, who jokes that Los Angelinos meetingsomeone from Honduras or El Salvador or Guatemala inevitably ask"Now, what part of Mexico is that?" Mencia exposes theexclusionary work of the foundational binary that identifiesrace in Black/White terms with a logic that reintroduces thecombinatory: If you're white, you're white in L.A. Go to Miamiand you're still white. If you're black in L.A., go to New Yorkand you're still black. Referring to himself, Mencia points outthat in L.A. he's a Mexican. "If I go to Miami, I'm a Cuban. Andif I go to New York, I'm..." He gestures to the audience whorespond "Puerto Rican." "See," he concludes, "You know what I'mtalking about." Shunted off to the racial unconscious by afoundational Black/White race-ism, Mencia's own race must bearticulated by indirection. Thus, the unary signifier "Hispanic"remains in the linguistic Otherness and only enters the jokeobliquely, as a signifier for anothersignifier--[Hispanic]/Mexican, [Hispanic]/Cuban,[Hispanic]/Puerto Rican. Mencia's comedic tactic parallels thestrategy Benita Parry praises in Bhabha's post-colonial theory:Bhabha "show[s] the wide range of stereotypes and the shiftingsubject positions assigned to the colonized in the colonialisttext" in order to liberate "an autonomous native 'difference'"from the binary European/Other (41).[4] Similarly, JudithButler's Bodies that Matter works with the exclusionary logicsof both male/female and heterosexual/homosexual to open up thecombinatory expressions of sexual orientation these foundationalbinaries preclude. Since these latter examples of linguisticidentity have ventured into the territory of complex Othernessevocative of Lacan's theory of the registers, this is a goodpoint at which to distinguish clearly the doubling of alterityin the symbolic and the imaginary.

There is no Other of the Other:

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(but there is an other of the Other)

12. The journey that eventually leads Lacan to the aphoristicinsistence that "there is no Other of the Other" (there is nometa-language beyond language) begins with a denaturalization ofparanoid psychosis. The ideas Lacan forms during his medicaltraining lead him to counter the prevailing psychiatric view ofpsychosis as a biologically-based personality trait by positinga developmental phenomenology he only later finds in Freud.Interested in folies à deux, and especially as such madnessmanifests in women's "inspired" speech and writings, Lacan isvery much a man attuned to the surrealist 1930s.[5] What hewrites for medical journals he revises for surrealist journals,but his interest is consistently in the otherness of theother--an interest that culminates in mirror stage theory. Theinterpersonal here seems undeniable. Lacan writes about thecrime of the two Papin sisters. He writes his thesis on thepsychotic Aimée's attack on a famous French actress. Moreover,Lacan's many references to Hegel's struggle for recognitionbetween the Master and the Slave certainly imply an agon betweenpeople rather than a contest within. Lacan's mirror stage essaypoints out that a pigeon matures via an encounter with anotherof its own kind. Even the mirroring moment can be read asinvolving the infant and the mother. All in all, early on, Lacanseems deeply involved with the interpersonal, the social, eventhe cultural.

13. Read against the retrospect of his later interests, mirror stagetheory appears to be Lacan's failed attempt to explain thedynamics of an intrapsychic alterity in interpersonal terms. Notuntil his theory of the registers does Lacan achieve thepost-humanist position he seeks. The dominance of a formativephenomenology in the earlier essay gives "The Mirror Stage" itsinterpersonal slant. In the theory of the registers, bycontrast, the phenomenal is folded within the structure oflanguage and intrapsychic structure is irremediably fissuredwith the gaps between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.Since none of the registers is confluent with the others, Lacanavoids the problem of a seamless solipsism. He avoids a tabularasa subjectivity passively constructed from without as well.So, it is not experience but experience's imagistic residue thatfigures in the imaginary register. It is not the many instancesof communication with other people but language as a whole thatsignifies in the symbolic. Nor is the model without constraintsince the real is always there as an unimaginable, unsignifiablelimit on what would otherwise constitute a psychic en abîme ofmirroring or signification without end.

14. Models of the psyche necessarily inform analytic praxis, andLacan's theory of the registers is his attempt to come to grips

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with the theory/practice gap. While Schema L as the sketch onLacan's chalkboard is not the model on the analyst's couch,there is an intriguing and ambiguous family relationship betweenthe two. Though the terms may be the same, the contexts differ,and working across the contextual divide can make Lacan's theoryappear to contradict itself, rendering straightforwardterminology paradoxical. The problem of discussing alterity ismade all the more difficult for Lacan because he continuallyengages the divide between the interpersonal situation ofanalysis in practice and the intrapsychic dynamics thatunderwrite whatever interventions analytic practice makes.Practice motivates the transition from mirror stage theory toregister theory as the latter is announced in Lacan's manifestoon the function of speech and language in the Freudian field.His paper takes issue with non-Lacanian forms of analysis thathe finds therapeutically inadequate precisely because of theiremphases on the interpersonal. Increasingly, Lacan insists thatanalysis must be a process in which the analyst creates atherapeutic context where the analysand's intrapsychic processesare the only processes in play. The cadaverous, "dead" positionof the Lacanian analyst is meant to deconstruct analysis ashumanistic interaction. Thus, Lacan's discussion of Othernessmust be read with special attention to context for threereasons: because Otherness is a term that Lacan himself doublesin his structural theory of the registers and in his dynamictheory of desire, because it is a term that defines anintrapsychic process and determines an interpersonal practice,and because it is a signifier shared by the discourse ofanalysis and by everyday language.

15. Since the idea of otherness is a term whose name--"theother"--remains the same but whose implications change, Lacanprovides many interpretations of otherness. Some of the examplescontrast the other with the Other and emphasize the distinctionbetween the registers. In his second seminar, for instance, hecompares the "radical Other" as one "pole of the subjectiverelation," with the "other which isn't an other at all, since itis essentially coupled with the ego, in a relation which isalways reflexive, interchangeable" (321). Bearing in mind thatLacan is discussing a subjective rather than an intersubjectiverelation, and that the reflexive coupling of other with ego isan intrapsychic phenomenon for which another person is, at best,a prop or a pretext, consider this elaboration of the analyst'salterity: the analyst "partakes of the radical nature of theOther, in so far as he is what is most inaccessible" to theextent that the analyst's own ego is "effaced" and the analyst'sresistance is not aroused (324). The analyst's refusal to playalong with the game dictated by the ego of the analysand throwsthe analysand back into a confrontation with the intrapsychicgap between the other and the Other, since expecting to confirm

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the former the analysand encounters the latter. So, "what leavesthe imaginary of the ego of the subject is in accordance notwith this other to which he is accustomed, and who is just hispartner, the person who is made so as to enter into his game,but precisely with this radical Other which is hidden from him"(324). Without another person to play along with the habitualimaginary game, the subject looks to the intrapsychic Other. Ifthe analysis is successful, the Other will yield to the subjectits Truth.

16. Appropriately, one of Lacan's exemplary readings of radicalalterity occurs in his Seminar III on psychosis, where hepresents an analytic case study exploring the speech of aparanoid young woman. In this reworking of his analytic roots,Lacan presents a clear decentering of the imaginary other fromthe symbolic Other. The disjunction is evident in Lacan'sredefinition of psychotic projection--which might seem to beclassically imaginary--as a mechanism that has been "placedoutside the general symbolization structuring the subject" andreturns "from without" (47). Lacan's patient is a "girl" whotells him about her "run-in in the hallway with an ill-manneredsort of chap," a married man who was also the illicit lover ofher neighbor. While passing her in the hall, the man haddevalued her by saying a dirty word to her. But she herself hadspoken to him first, saying "I've just been to the butcher's"[the charcutier, who specializes in pork]. He had responded:"Sow!" In his analysis, Lacan's own response to the girl is amistake, he admits. He interprets. He shows his analysand thathe understands her comment "I've just been to the butcher's" asa reference to pork, and by doing so he "enter[s] into thepatient's game... collaborat[ing] in [her] resistance" (48).Though he does not explicitly articulate his failure in terms ofthe registers, the distinction is clear. Lacan, through hisdisplay of "understanding," has reinforced the patient'simaginary at the expense of asking, symbolically, why there issomething in the patient's speech to be understood. The analyticquestion is: "Why did she say, I've just been to the butcher'sand not Pig?" (48-49).

17. Lacan goes on to insist that the interaction between the girlwho might have said "Pig!" and the man who calls her "Sow!" isnot an instance of his maxim that in speech the subject receivesher message in an inverted form. In other words, here, themessage should not be constructed as a symbolic exchange sincethe message at issue "is not identical with speech, far from it"(Sem III 49). The girl herself is enmeshed in the desire of herneighbor and the neighbor's lover, a desire of which she iscensorious to the point of wondering whether it is possible"through taking legal action, to get them into hospital" (49).She had been friends with the neighbor until the love affair

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interrupted the friendship; afterwards she intruded on thecouple while they were dining or reading or "at their toilet"until they threw her out. So Lacan rereads the conversation'sintrapsychic implications: "Sow, what is that? It is effectivelyher message, but is it not rather her message to herself?" (49).The analysand's ego has met her alter ego in the hallway; themoment is a mirror.

18. Lacan connects this case study to his schema of subjectivity:

... Is it the reality of objects that is at issue? Whonormally speaks in reality, for us? Is it reality, exactly,when someone speaks to us? The point of the remarks I madeto you last time on the other and the Other, the other witha small o and the Other with a big O, was to get you tonotice that when the Other with a big O speaks it is notpurely and simply the reality in front of you, namely theindividual who is holding forth. The Other is beyond thatreality.

In true speech the Other is that before which you makeyourself recognized. But you can make yourself recognizedby it only because it is recognized first. (50-51)

Having thus clarified the impersonal nature of the big Other,Lacan notes that in the paranoid insult, the Other is not inquestion since the patient doesn't recognize the Other "behindhim who is speaking. She receives her own speech from him, butnot inverted, her own speech is in the other who is herself, thelittle other, her reflection in the mirror, her counterpart"(51). Though she seems to look at another person, the girl seesonly herself.

19. The distinction Lacan makes here between the Other and theother, between the symbolic and the imaginary, involves the pactof language. Part of the process of recognition for the Subjectas a subject involves the risky business of addressing theabsolute Other beyond all that is known. Addressed to anotherperson, the very Otherness of speech puts that person in aposition to be recognized by the speaker and to recognize thespeaker in return because both speakers share a symboliccommitment of which neither speaker is the origin. Committedspeech is discourse, which for Lacan "includes acts, steps, thecontortions of puppets, yourselves included, caught up in thegame... An utterance commits you to maintaining it through yourdiscourse, or to repudiating it, or to objecting to it, or toconforming to it, to refuting it, but, even more, to complyingwith many things that are within the rules of the game" (51).With these relationships between the registers, alterity,discourse, and the pact in mind, I want to return to two

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discourses on identity and Otherness that address Lacan'sregister theory directly--one by invoking it, another byrepudiating it--in order to explore the link between discourseand symptom.

Discourse, Symptom, and Otherness:"The unconscious is the discourse of the Other."

20. The following two examples of the discourse of identitytheory--Abdul R. JanMohamed's "The Economy of ManicheanAllegory" and Judith Butler's "The Lesbian Phallus and theMorphological Imaginary"--offer critiques engaging LacanianOtherness. As critiques, these essays are discourses aboutdiscourses, meta-discourses in which Otherness signifies.Because meta-discourses offer levels of complexity, symptomsappear in such discourses as deflections of the discursive flowas such. Briefly, the Lacanian symptom, like the letter in the"Purloined Letter," is "a fourth element, which can serve... assignum" (Sem I 280). The symptom operates to link the imaginaryand the symbolic into signs which figure against the real of"the organism as ground" (280). Slavoj Zizek points to theelement of repetition involved in the Lacanian symptom,identifying the symptom as "a particular signifying formationwhich confers on the subject its very ontological consistency...if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the groundunder his feet, disintegrates" (155). This element ofconsistency conferred by the symptom is characteristic of whatLacan calls the "narcissistic Bildung" of the ego and relates tothe repetitious character of empty speech. Since theoreticalterms easily empty themselves of meaning (as theory's opponentstirelessly point out), the "Other" may mark a symptom in adiscourse of identity.

21. In this first encounter between identity theory and Lacaniananalysis, Abdul R. JanMohamed uses the Lacanian registers tomake a distinction between forms of colonial discourse. A usefulerror--possibly a symptom--occurs in JanMohamed's essay at thepoint where the discourse of post-colonialism disrupts thediscourse on the registers forcing an either/or choice betweenirreconcilable constructions of Otherness. This error provides ahelpful comparison to a similar error in Butler's chapter, anerror productive of a symptom at every level of Butler'sdiscourse, from the literal, to the paradigmatic, to theinterpretive. Since from the analytic point of view both theerror and the symptom locate discursive truth, both JanMohamedand Butler tell the truth about the encounter between theoriesof identity and the Lacanian registers.

22. The registers appear as unified and unifying descriptivecategories when Abdul R. JanMohamed writes "I would argue that

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colonialist literature is divisible into two broad categories:the 'imaginary' and the 'symbolic'" (19). Next, JanMohamed goeson to transcend the categorical in a sophisticated contrastbetween the work that aggressivity does in the 'imaginary' textand the work that mediation and problematization do in the'symbolic' text. Having employed a Lacanian discourse to framehis discussion of the colonialist novel, however, JanMohamedwrites that some "symbolic" novels are "conceived in the'symbolic' realm of intersubjectivity, heterogeneity, andparticularity but are seduced by the specularity of 'imaginary'Otherness" (19-20). This sudden collapsing of the distinctionbetween the registers in the error "'imaginary' Otherness" isjarring to any reader familiar with Lacan. Abdul R. JanMohamedhas broken the law!

23. Since JanMohamed's essay provides exemplary instances both ofdiscursive creativity and of discursive failure as they impactthe relation between the writer and his reader, I want to reviewthe sequence above in two ways. First, I will look at theinterpersonal symbolic law of discourse that, once invoked,binds writer to reader in an intrasubjective and impersonalpact. The writer's thesis invokes Lacan's discourse of theregisters and asks the reader to be bound by the pact that thisdiscourse constitutes. This is a symbolic pact par excellencesince neither the writer nor the reader originate the discoursebut both agree to be bound by its rules in order to allow thepossibility of a meaningful exchange, in order to agree on theterms by which they will produce meanings together. Since thewriter has selected a Lacanian discourse, 'imaginary' and'symbolic' cease to be overdetermined signifiers in thelinguistic unconscious. 'Imaginary' and 'symbolic' now invoke aset of relations defined by Lacan's discourse, a discourse inwhich these terms signify in quite specific ways. Because andonly because he has involved his reader in this pact of theregisters, JanMohamed is free to explore the implications of theencounter between Lacanian theory and the colonialist novel. Asthe writer elaborates the particulars of the work of theimaginary in the colonialist novel, the reader can appreciateJanMohamed's insight because the reader sees the colonialistnovel in fresh and interesting ways and because the fruitfulencounter between the Lacanian imaginary and colonialist fictionreveals new and unforeseen implications of the imaginaryregister itself. Creativity thus requires the law; creativity isparadoxically both bound to the law and unbound by it.

24. The moment JanMohamed writes "'imaginary' Otherness," he breaksthe law of Lacanian discourse and cancels his pact with thereader. Until the violation occurs, the reader is bound by thepact called "Lacanian discourse"; "imaginary," "symbolic," and"Otherness" hold out the possibility of meaning-making (though

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they do not guarantee it). At the breaking of the pact, theterms cease to be terms within a discourse; released from thepact they are signifiers only. Lacking their discursive support,"imaginary" and "Otherness" thus signify randomly. Because hehas broken his Lacanian pact with the reader, the reader has nopossible way to grasp what JanMohamed might be trying to signifyby "'imaginary' Otherness." No context can stabilize whatfractured discursive syntax has set free. Since significationoutside the pact is idiosyncratic, the effect of the broken pactis to change "imaginary" and "Otherness" into random markersthat preclude creativity in both the writing and the reading.The markers come and go--in and out of the linguisticunconscious--for reasons that may or may not be related to thecolonialist novel, the stated project at hand. Once the pact hasbeen broken by the writer, the reader can always declare thediscursive failure an accident and continue as if the pact werestill in place--but the reader is now on alert and anyadditional error will render the text indecipherable in terms ofits stated project.[6]

25. Besides the rupture of interpersonal give and take betweenwriter and reader, the collapse of this fruitful contact betweenthe discourse of the colonial novel and Lacan's discourse of theregisters in JanMohamed's essay signifies intrapsychically asthe deformation of one discourse by another. If repeated,"'imaginary' Otherness" becomes a symptom rather than an error,and the essay manifests a subjective encounter with Othernessfar beyond its post-colonial critique. Consequently, thediscursive symptom provides a profitable alternative to thesterile fusion of Lacanian theory with the discourse ofpost-colonialism. Because Lacan's distinction between theregisters implies a decentering of Otherness that JanMohamedcannot maintain while simultaneously committed to apost-colonial construction of Self and Other, the reader ismoved to ask why there is a symptom in the discourse at thispoint. It seems that the entified Other appears here as thesymptom of a post-colonial commitment that runs deeper than theLacanian discourse to which the writer is ostensibly committed.Since the Other of humanism cannot signify save by suturing thegap between the imaginary other and the symbolic Other, this isprecisely what JanMohamed does. The repressed post-colonialhumanism returns in the symptomatic fusion of "'imaginary'Otherness."

26. The discursive symptom manifest in Abdul R. JanMohamed's essaysignifies psychoanalytically because he intends to use theLacanian registers to frame his exploration of the colonialnovel. A very different discursive symptom arises in JudithButler's influential critique of Lacanian analysis, Bodies thatMatter, a critique in which she doubts that the registers

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signify at all. Here, a fusion of Lacanian registers pervadesButler's discussion of "The Lesbian Phallus and theMorphological Imaginary." While both Butler and JanMohamedeffect symptomatic erasures of the Lacanian other, thesymptomatic erasure in Butler manifests distinctively--as aninability to accurately quote Lacan's own text in spite of herextraordinary scholarly rigor.[7] The misquotations enter herdiscussion from the moment Butler denies the distinction betweenthe registers, but the symptom is prefigured by her insertion ofLacan's structural theory of the registers into his essay on themirror stage.

27. Butler's chapter conflates psychoanalytic models that aretheoretically and historically distinct--both Freudian modelsand Lacanian ones, and this conflation lays the theoreticalgroundwork from which the symptomatic misquotations arise. Thus,Butler reads "On Narcissism" against The Ego and the Id, thoughthe former belongs to a mid-Freudian model that differssignificantly from the last "entified" model of a psychecomposed of Id-Ego-Superego. Similarly, Butler uses Lacan'smirror stage essay to argue for the imaginary nature of thephallus in "The Signification of the Phallus"--even though theformer essay provides a coda to Lacan's early phenomenal anddevelopmental model of the psyche while the latter condenses aportion of the seminar on desire, a seminar reflecting Lacan'sstructural theorizing at its strongest. As we have earlier seen,though mirror stage theory and register theory do sharesignifiers, their variant theoretical models constellate variantsignifieds; if the terms remain the same, their meanings havestructurally altered. However, the alteration fails to make itsway into Butler's critical assimilation of the latter model toits predecessor.

28. Butler's most overtly symptomatic collapsing of the Lacanianregisters reveals itself in her persistent error in directlyquoting the text of Lacan's early seminars. Like JanMohamed,Butler substitutes the symbolic Other for the mirroring other.It is as if, having merged mirror stage theory with registertheory, Butler is literally unable to see a significatorydifference between the two. As a result, Butler continuallyfails to distinguish the imaginary other from the symbolicOther, a collapse of terminological distinction equivalent tosuggesting there is no difference between the Subject and theego. Since the distinction within alterity is so central toLacanian theory generally and to his model of the Subject of theunconscious specifically, other and Other are definitional.Moreover, the other and the Other draw a precise and consistentdistinction between the mirroring imaginary and the symbolictreasury of signifiers. By continually effacing the imaginaryother with the symbolic Other, Butler indeed does what she

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explicitly states as her essay's goal: she "rewrit[es] themorphological imaginary" (72) though the rewriting is far moreliteral than her subheading implies.

29. Where Lacan speaks of the body finding its unity "in the imageof the other" with a small o (Sem II 54), Butler rewrites "inthe image of the Other" with a capital (75), and where Lacanwrites "the imaginary structuration of the ego forms around thespecular image of the body itself, of the image of the other,"small o, imaginary other (Sem II 94), Butler again revises to"the image of the Other" with a capital O (76), collapsingLacan's straightforward structural distinction and begging theissue of structural difference. Butler perpetuates the error inher own discussion, commenting that "the specular image of thebody itself is in some sense the image of the Other" (76) andthat the "extrapolating function" of narcissism is the"principle by which any other object or Other is known" (77).There is no small irony in Butler's symptomatic misquotation ofLacan given her rigorous inclusion of parallel phrases from bothFrench and English texts, and carefully documented citationsfrom both the French and English seminars.[8] But as Lacanpoints out, the unconscious is always visible, right there,literally spelled out in the symptom in the text--and Butler'stext proves no exception to this Lacanian rule.

30. The symptomatic disappearance of the imaginary other in Butler'sthoroughgoing critique of the mirror stage essay parallels theconflation of the registers in JanMohamed's essay. InJanMohamed's criticism, the symptom arises at the moment ofdiscursive incompatibility between the post-colonial paradigm ofSelf and Other and the Lacanian distinction between an other andthe Other as the unconscious locus of language. Is there asimilar discursive rupture in Butler's argument? Looking moreclosely at Butler's actual text may be helpful here. Thesubstitutions begin in citations in which Lacan specificallymentions the body in connection with the registers--so Butler'scentral concern in Bodies that Matter and her theory ofperformativity are both at stake when the misquotations begin.Her page-long explication of Lacan's mirror stage theory inwhich five symptomatic substitutions of the symbolic Other forthe imaginary other occur also addresses the body, specificallythe "organs [that] are caught up in the narcissistic relation"(76-77). The following page of text, on which the symptomaticsubstitution occurs three more times, argues that the previouslygeneric "organs" may be "the male genitals" (77), and if so,Lacan's mirror stage theory grounds itself on a specificallymasculine narcissism. Butler concludes that the narcissisticallyengaged masculine organs now condition and structure everyobject and Other, and as a result, the "extrapolating function"of narcissism raised to an epistemological principle becomes

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phallogocentric. In short, a phallic imaginary is masculine andany explanatory function such an imaginary might serve isinherently phallogocentric. Therefore, it is from Lacan'sphallogocentrism that Butler's lesbian phallus liberates us,providing a subversive substitute for the hetero/sexist PhallicSignifier that she herself has taken great pains to introduceinto the Lacanian imaginary register.

31. Here, more explicitly, is the problem. Lacan theorizes thatthere is a privileged signifier in the symbolic register andthat this privileged symbolic signifier is the phallus. Butlerwants to argue against the real of the body, wants to argue thatthe body is "a process whereby regulatory norms materialize'sex' and achieve this materialization through a forciblereiteration of those norms" (2). Thus, Butler's theory ofmaterialization stops short of the radical constructionist claimthat the body is only a symbolic construct. She finds anappealing alternative to constructionism in Lacan's early theorywhere the imagined, alienated body appears in the mirror. ThisLacanian mirroring replication supports Butler's theory ofmaterialization. But Lacan did not stop with his mirror stagetheory, and though he once situated the body helpfully in theimaginary, he later positioned the phallus in the symbolicregister--where Butler very much needs it not to be if herargument for a projective materialization of a phantasmaticphallus is to succeed. Consequently, a collapsing of Lacanianparadigms and issues ensues.

32. After arguing for the imaginary nature of the penis, Butler goeson to suggest that Lacan has simply renamed the penis thephallus (80); further, that the penis is the "privilegedreferent" to be symbolized by the phallus (84); and finally,that the relationship between penis and phallus (and byimplication between imaginary and symbolic) is the relationshipof signified to signifier (90). But issues of significatoryslippage are not issues of reference, nor are they issues ofmeaning, and this series of conflations simply reiterates theearlier fusion of psychoanalytic models, creating a theoreticalpastiche against which Butler then argues with greatsophistication and subtlety.[9] Given the persistent insertionof the symbolic into the imaginary, and the assimilation of thesymbolic construct phallus to the image of the penis, it is notsurprising to hear Butler conclude that "if the phallus is animaginary effect, a wishful transfiguration, then it is notmerely the symbolic status of the phallus that is called intoquestion, but the very distinction between the symbolic and theimaginary" (79). But just whose wishful transfiguration doesButler's text demonstrate, we may want to ask, since thesymptom, Freud tells us, marks the location of the wish and ithas clearly been Butler's wish to do away with the distinction

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between the registers all along. Since Butler's critique mergesLacan's phallic discourse of desire with his theory of theregisters, I next distinguish betweeen these two in "Thesignificantion of the phallus," Lacan's most controversialessay. Returning the phallic signifier to the symbolic register,in turn, shows how the signifying phallus generates apost-humanist Otherness.

"Man's [sic] desire is the desire of the Other"

33. Lacan's hypothesis of the phallic signifier offers amany-layered theory of unconscious Otherness at odds with anyconscious marking of any human being as an "Other." While theLacanian unconscious locates power in Otherness, the phallicsignifier, by contrast, locates power in subjectivity. Unlikethe unity of the imaginary imago, which provides a simplereferential image of an other, the symbolic phallic signifierconstrains Otherness by buttoning a signifier, anidentification, and a discourse together into one neat package.In the wildly overdetermined signifying multiplicity of thesymbolic register, the phallus provides a determined anddetermining force. It is precisely the phallic propensity forself-replication that inseminates the reproduction--thereiteration as Butler calls it--of the Subject. What is at issuein Lacan's polemic "The Signification of the Phallus" is thepredominant role of this phallic signifier as the Aufhebung ofsignifying difference per se. Since this is a far more complexidea than either the decentering of the Subject or the gapwithin alterity, we will proceed slowly. Lacan insists thatseven years of seminars have brought him to the conclusion thathe must "promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analyticphenomena the notion of the signifier, as opposed to that of thesignified" (284); he must insist on the priority of the markerover its meanings. Freud's discovery, which predates Saussure'sretroactive linguistic explication of it, "gives to thesignifier/signified opposition the full extent of itsimplications: namely that the signifier has an active functionin determining certain effects in which the signifiable appearsas submitting to its mark" (284). Thus, the active, agenticfunction of language resides in mark-making, and signifying isan active rather than a reflective process.

34. That a subject is the product of a linguistic unconscious shouldnot be taken as evidence of this subject's "cultural"construction (284), nor should a subject be seen as the productof an "ideological psycho-genesis" (285). Lacan sees Horney'sfeminist social-psychological analysis as the latter anddismisses all such "question-begging appeal to the concrete"(285). Appeal to the concrete is beside the Freudian point. Theonly laws that interest Lacan are the laws that govern the other

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scene of the unconscious, the laws of combination andsubstitution--of metaphor and metonymy--by which signifiersgenerate the "determining effects for the institution of thesubject" (285). Lacan goes on to define the Other as that bywhich he "designate[es]... the very locus evoked by the recourseto speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes" (285).The logic of the signifier is thus anterior to the production ofmeaning, the "awakening of the signified" (285)--suggesting thatmeaning is discovered rather than made wherever the unconsciousis in play.

35. Lacan next invokes his theory of the registers to reiterate hisargument for the symbolic character of the phallus as aprivileged signifier. The phallus of Freudian doctrine cannot beassigned to the imaginary register because it "is not aphantasy" (285). Nor is it constrained by the biological real of"the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes" (285). "Forthe phallus is a signifier," Lacan concludes, having made hiscase for the location of the signifying phallus in the symbolicregister. But it is a signifier with a difference from othersignifiers. The phallus is a signifier that can "designate as awhole the effects of the signified" (285). We can tell that aphallic signifier is present by its effects. And what are theseeffects? The linguistic fate of the speaking being is to beunable to articulate need save as a demand that empowers theOther as a repository of love. The residue of inarticulable needreturns from this Otherness as desire.

36. Need/demand/desire. Lacan reiterates the relationship betweenthe three: "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, northe demand for love, but the difference that results from thesubtraction of the first from the second" (287). Thus, whilereal needs can be satisfied, imaginary demands maypersist--opening a gap generative of desire. This intrapsychicformula for desire leads Lacan to think relationally, and so hegoes on to rework the role of the Other in terms of the sexualrelation. Now, the sexual relation is rendered enigmatic becauseit is "doubly 'signifying'" and ambiguous because of "the Otherin question." The ambiguity arises here from the fact that theOther has a place in both the discourse of the registers and thediscourse of desire. Here, moreover, the intrapsychic and theinterpersonal seem utterly and ambiguously mixed. Thus, "forboth partners in the relation, both the subject and the Other,it is not enough to be subjects of need, or objects of love,but... they must stand for the cause of desire" (287).Subject/object/Other meet Subject/object/Other Lacan seems to besaying--weaving a double discourse of the intrapsychic with theinteractive.

37. Since the sexual relation seems to involve the signifying

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phallus irretrievably in the interpersonal beyond ofsignification, I want to review the intrapsychic dynamics ofthis crucial Lacanian concept. First, Lacan has repeatedly toldus that the signifier is binary--and he has exemplified thisbinary signifier in paired relations such as day/night, and redcards/black cards. The sexed (reproductive) relation is binaryas well, feminine/masculine. Next, however, Lacan tells us thatthe phallus is a "privileged signifier," a signifier of thesexual relation that we are to take in the "literal(typographical) sense of the term" (287). And how is thisliteral phallic pictogram of "the sexual relation" written? FThus, Lacan concludes, the phallus is "equivalent... to the(logical) copula" (287). In the larger context of Lacan'sdiscussion of the binary symbolic signifier, the phallus is thefoundation signifying as such. The phallic signifier, thefoundational difference in and of itself, is rendered latent bythe emergence of the signifying binary terms. "The phallus isthe signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inaugurates(initiates) by its disappearance" (288); thus "reproduction"disappears leaving behind the signifying difference"female"/"male" or "race" disappears from the foundationaldistinction "black"/"white." Where has the phallus gone now thatthe paired terms appear? It is retained as the bar separatingthe terms, a signifier rendered inarticulable by the terms itleaves behind, yet simultaneously a signifier imperative totheir signifying difference.

38. To those who feel this reading of "The Signification of thePhallus" constitutes a recuperation of an irreparablyphallogocentric discourse, I can only say that Lacan's logic ofthe phallus captures the foundation in foundational thinkingvividly. As a result, this phallogicentrism provides anextraordinarily valuable analytic tool. For me, thephallogicentrism of the essay is a discourse separable from theessay's 1950s-style cultural discourse on the role of the manand the role of the woman in the comedy of intercourse. WhenLacan begins to read the cultural "relation between the sexes"(289) in the essay's concluding polemic against Melanie Klein,he lapses into a heteronormative construction of sexed Love thatends with an apparent affirmation of Freud's intuition thatthere is "only one libido" and it is masculine. On firstreading, years ago now, this section of the essay struck me asirrecuperably sexist and heterosexist--though it is imperativehere to point out that the Freudian libido has nothing (nothing?) in common with the Lacanian imaginary. I can only notewith some amusement that I found penciled in my margin of thisconcluding section "time for a lesbian deconstruction." On thisaccount, Judith Butler has read my desire. Now, since Butler hasreturned, I want to bring back theories of identity for one lastencounter with Lacanian Otherness.

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"The unconscious is the discourse [emphasis mine] of the Other"

39. The widespread insistence that Lacan's brief écrit on thephallus is about dominance (and only dominance) rather thandifference exemplifies the kind of foundationalism Lacanindicates by the phrase "having the phallus." Moreover, foldingthis foundation back into an imaginary identification--presumingthat one is oneself the "Other" of a Self/Other binary--is aninstance of "being the phallus." Gayatri Spivak notes just sucha phallic politics of identification in "the fierce turf battlesin radical cultural studies in multiracial cultures as well ason the geo-graphed globe, where the only possible politics seemssometimes to be the politics of identity in the name of beingthe Other" (159). Preferring the symbolic to the imaginary (asLacan himself does), Spivak applauds those who stand up for therights of groups with whom they are not primarily identified.Playing the F card (whether the phallic investment is in sex,race, class, or nation) may well be the solution to puttingone's own identity concerns on the table--both for Lacan and forhis critics--but in terms of the registers, this solutionrefuses the encounter with the unconscious as the discourse ofthe Other. Instead, the primarily identified analyst understandsrather than listens; knows in advance rather than finds out.Consequently, phallic foundationalism is a tactic with whichLacan does not agree, though it is a tactic to which he is nothimself perpetually immune, especially when he is caught up inpolemics over the practice of psychoanalysis.

40. In matters of politics more generally, Lacan remains skeptical,feeling that those who oppose oppression today will, onceempowered, commit the very oppression they accuse. He comparesthe idealistic reformer to Hegel's belle âme. The beautiful soullives "(in every sense, even the economic sense of making aliving) precisely on the disorder that it denounces" (Écrits126), enabling us to "understand how the constitution of theobject is subordinated to the realization of the subject" (80).More briefly and cynically put, the entified "Other" may be nomore than a pretext for the subject's speech, or tenure. Bycontrast, analysis shows the way in which "identity is realizedas disjunctive of the subject" (80). It is precisely because thesubject is not the same as the ego identity that interpersonalmisapprehension can trigger the anxiety of intrapsychicOtherness. Since the gesture of disowning Otherness is so veryprotective of identity, it seems counterintuitive to ownalienation when it appears. At the moment of alienation thesubject has not merely reached its boundaries, it has exceededthem. Grasping onto fixed identity as an anchor with which tomaster the impending decentering is only logical--yet mastery isineffectual, and "analysts have to deal with slaves who think

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they are masters, and who find in a language whose mission isuniversal the support of their servitude, and the bonds of itsambiguity" (Écrits 81).

41. Since Lacanian analysis supports neither the discourse ofcategorical identity nor the rhetoric of blame that sofrequently accompanies it, it might appear that Lacan has littleto offer political analysis, especially where issues of identityare foremost. However, I believe that neither the otherness ofhostile objectification nor the Otherness productive ofalienation alone offers the resource for political critique thatexamining the disjunction between the two affords. CarlosMencia's joke points to the alternative, to the location ofpoliticized difference in another scene that addresses thephallic investment itself rather than the terms by which thatinvestment is veiled. Analysis can indeed locate the politicalin another scene that is both a decentering of the subject andan exposé of the epistemology of a fixed or fixable Otherness.If ego identity is the certainty from which the subject isdecentered, then "the art of the analyst must be to suspend thesubject's certainties until their last mirages have beenconsumed" (Écrits 43). If "psychoanalysis... reveals both theone and the other [the individual and the collective] to be nomore than mirages" (80), then analysis seems at odds with thePlatonic emphasis on a Self/Other binary though not withidentity politics as a whole. Where identity is at issue, Lacaninsists that "it is not a question of knowing whether I speak ofmyself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather ofknowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak" (165).Regarding alterity, Lacan's register theory would have uswithhold our demands and acknowledge our desires as our own sothat we can better listen for the discourse of the Other--if theOther's Truth is what we genuinely desire to hear. And what isTruth? "Truth is nothing other than that which knowledge canapprehend as knowledge only by setting ignorance to work a realcrisis in which the imaginary is resolved, thus engendering anew symbolic form" (296).

42. Since the engendering of a new symbolic form was very much atissue in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, I draw one finalexample of the political use of decentered Otherness from N.Katherine Hayles's critique of the Conference proceedings in herrecent book How We Became Posthuman (50-83). The Other's Truthemerges through Hayles's analysis, even though her argument forthe dangerous supplementarity of embodiment to informationtheory is, at least in part, a rejection of Lacan. The role ofOtherness here is all the more compelling because the discussionillustrative of alterity is not an application of Lacanian termsto cultural texts. Rather, Hayles's reading of the substitutionof one signifier for another recovers a woman held under erasure

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by the same mark-effacing mechanism at work in Mencia's comicreplications of ethnicity.

43. The woman in question appears in a photograph taken at the 1952Macy Conference, the meeting at which psychoanalyst LawrenceKubie made his last ditch attempt to insert subjectivity intothe debates defining information as universally portable,disembodied data. Unlike Kubie, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead,and the other intellectual luminaries, the woman sits with herback to the photographer. The position of her hands and bodysuggest that she is typing. Though the picture's notationidentifies her as Janet Freud, Katherine Hayles points out thatshe is in all probability Janet Freed, who appears throughoutthe Macy transcripts as "assistant to the conference program"(81). In the substitution of a famous man for an anonymous womanHayles has all she needs to propound a feminist reading of thephotograph as evidence of woman as "Other," marshalling theremaining conference materials in support of this gendereddifference. But such a reading would betray a phallic investmentin gender, and Hayles does not yield to the temptation to playphallic politics with Freud. Instead, she turns her attention toanother error: a handwritten note dating the photo of the 1952Conference as "1953."

44. By holding the 1952 meeting under erasure, attendees distancedthemselves from the hostilities erupting in its wake. At thatconference, the dueling paradigms of homeostasis and reflexivitymet head to head over the issue of scientific objectivity. Thedominant group of intellectuals, including the neurophysiologistWarren McCulloch (credited as one of the fathers of the neuralnet), propounded an idea of information founded on assumptionsof a detached observer safely distanced from the observed.Arguing against McCulloch was the hard-line Freudian analystLawrence Kubie, who insisted on the implication of the observerin the observation. The stand-off between the two paradigms andtheir champions exceeded the conference. A subsequent exchangeof demands testified to the otherness of theory as a mirror ofthe ego identity of the theorist: McCulloch offered a fierydenunciation of psychoanalysis; in response, Kubie set fellowpsychoanalysts the task of secretly observing McCulloch out of"concern" for the scientist's emotional health. Though thevehemence of this exchange suggests an irreconcilable face off,both sides of the debate revolved around a single axis ofargument informed by a series of signifying oppositions:objective/subjective, dispassionate/affective,empirical/reflexive, rational consciousness/ unconsciousmotivation--the thick epistemology of the 1950s.

45. These are the oppositions across whose boundary conferenceorganizer Frank Fremont-Smith could not effect rapproachment,

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perhaps because Kubie had angered the other participants byseeing their positions as "resistance" to his own (Hayles70-73). The aggressive emotional charge attached topsychoanalysis could account for the phonemic association thatreplaced the name of Fremont-Smith's assistant Janet /Fr/eed bythat of the trouble-making /Fr/eud. The double displacements ofname and of conference date bequeath their textual challenge toKatherine Hayles in her search for the Truth of the Other ofinformation articulated by Janet Freed's return from therepressed. Here is Hayles's analysis:

"Take a letter, Miss Freed," he says... A woman comes in,marks are inscribed onto paper, letters appear, conferencesare arranged, books are published. Taken out of context,his words fly, by themselves, into books. The full burdenof the labor that makes these things happen is for him onlyan abstraction, a resource diverted from other possibleuses, because he is not the one performing the labor...Miss Freed has no such illusions. Embedded in context, sheknows that words never make things happen by themselves...On a level beyond words, beyond theories and equations, inher body and her arms and her fingers and her aching back,Janet Freed knows that information is never disembodied...(82-83)

Having refused the easy politics of labeling Freed the Other,Hayles discovers in Janet Freed the Truth of embodiment, at thesame time evoking a powerful feminist statement from the paradoxof Freed's visible invisibility. In the rich multivocality ofOtherness, Hayles hears Janet Freed speak for a class of laboras well as for her gender: Freed's erasure by the proponents ofabstracted information suggests that free-floating informationfeels intuitively true only to men of a certain class who are"in a position to command the labors of others" (82). Finally,in allowing Janet Freed's Truth to call into question the verydesire for decontextualized information itself, Hayles uncoversa paradigmatic politics informing the 1952 Macy Conference onCybernetics.

46. In all, N. Katherine Hayles's analysis demonstrates themulti-discursivity of the Other's Truth; when asked to speak,the Other has a lot to say. As a result, Hayles practices aLacanian politics of close listening. What she hears in theTruth of the decentered Other is the encounter between thediscourse of desire and the discourse of the registers; thus,Janet Freed appears in disappearing beneath the waves ofconferees' affect, beneath the sediment of their theoreticallanguage. Because Janet Freed speaks, because Hayles listens, wefind in their analytic encounter one final Lacanian Other. JanetFreed returns as the authentic subject of interpersonal

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exchange, the Other of whom the analyst must be perpetuallyinnocent. Lacan speaks of this "authentic Other" as anothersubject to be appreciated for its alterity, its capacity tosurprise. This authentic Other is available to any subject whois willing, like the Lacanian analyst, to annul the resistanceof her intrapsychic other and to accept the anxiety arousedwithin her intrapsychic Otherness. Then the vital encounterbetween two authentic subjects can aim "at the passage of truespeech, joining the subject to an other subject, on the otherside of the wall of language. That is the final relation of thesubject to a genuine Other, to the Other who gives the answerone doesn't expect, which defines the terminal point inanalysis" (Sem II 246).

47. And the terminal point in this discussion...

Department of English and Philosophy Idaho State University [email protected]

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Notes

1. For a discussion of otherness in Plato's Sophist see"Non-Being" in Stanley Rosen's Plato's Sophist: The Drama ofOriginal and Image, 269-290.

2. See de Beauvoir's note on Levinas in the introduction to The

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Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1989) xxii. The note isinteresting because de Beauvoir contains Levinas's discussion ofradical alterity as absolute contrariety by insisting it iswritten from a masculine point of view that disregards "thereciprocity of subject and object." However, for Levinas, as forLacan, subject and object are decidedly non-reciprocal--thepoint Lacan expresses by distinguishing the imaginary registerof the image from the symbolic register of the radical Other.Levinas reconsiders the idea of alterity in Outside the Subject(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), trans. Michael B. Smith. See,particularly, the concluding essay by that name.

3. Fanon himself does not hypothesize the term Other in BlackSkin, White Masks, but rather draws upon and critiques a numberof analysts and philosophers who do including Jean Veneuse,Sartre, and Lacan.

4. See also Homi K. Bhabha's detailed study of post-colonialismand alterity in "The other question: Stereotype, discriminationand the discourse of colonialism," chapter three in hiscollection The Location of Culture.

5. An entertaining account of Lacan's early interests and of hisoverwhelming reliance on case studies involving women can befound in Catherine Clément's "The Ladies' Way" in The Lives andLegends of Jacques Lacan, 53-101.

6. It might seem that a reader innocent of Lacanian discoursemight be a "better" reader of JanMohamed's essay, since thenaïve reader would not discern the discursive impossibility ofthe "'imaginary' Otherness." But in discourse as elsewhere,ignorance of the law is no excuse. Since the naïve reader has nodiscursive pact with the writer, what passes for reading is anextra-symbolic exercise in idiosyncrasy. Lacking the pact,"reading" would be a species of parasitic narcissism heldtogether--if it is held together at all--by the reader'simaginary identification with the writer, a mirroring instanceof "reading" as "writing."

7. Butler is an astute critic of psychoanalysis and has,throughout her career, raised significant issues aboutpsychoanalytic theory. Her article "Gender Trouble, FeministTheory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse" offers Butler'scharacteristically precise analysis of psychoanalysis' andfeminist theory's implications for each other. SeeFeminism/Postmodernism 324-40.

8. The irony of Butler's reading and its notable omission of theimaginary other is emphasized by her apt focus on Lacan's mostemphatically structural of the early seminars, The Seminar of

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Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in theTechnique of Psychoanalysis.

9. Reducing Lacanian theory to a unified field as Judith Butlerdoes supports binary notions of subject and symbolic Other,turning Lacan's intrapsychic model into an interpersonal modeland rewriting Lacan in the terms of theories of identity morediscursively assimilable to a paradigm of performativity. Thisinterpersonal model is clearly politicizable and compatible withthe kinds of Foucauldian and deconstructive political impulsesthat characterize Butler's own theory of "performance ascitation and gender as iteration" (Whitford, cover).Politically, then, Butler needs to situate the point of infinitesubstitution within a dualistic imaginary to accomplish her owntheoretical goals. Thus, the imaginary, in Butler's analysis, isregarded as a field that functions in a structurallyunproblematic way.

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