Dolar, Mladen “One Divides into Two.” e-flux journal #33 March 2012.
What, if anything, is the Other? What is the Other the name for?
The first answer proposed by Lacan develops in the direction of the Other as the Other of the symbolic order, the Other of language, the Other upholding the very realm of the symbolic, functioning as its guarantee, its necessary supposition, that which enables it to signify.
And if this claim is to be placed within the general thrust of structuralism, which was then dominant, the name of the Other, in this view, would be the structure.
The Other is the Other of structure, and one can nostalgically recall its Saussurean and Levi-Straussian underpinnings.
What follows from there, in the same general thrust, is the notorious formula The unconscious is structured like a language — The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
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Footnote: What if anything, is the Other? But asking “What?” already precludes another way of asking, namely, “Who is the other?” For the question of the other is first dramatically posed in relation to another person, this alter ego next to me, the same as me and for that very reason all the more the Other.
This is where the whole drama of what Lacan famously called the mirror stage comes in, the mirror stage “as formative of the function of the ego,” as the title of his first paper runs.
In this drama, the “alter ego” is constitutive of the ego, precisely insofar as it is the agent of alterity, opacity, the foreignness of the Other, under the auspices of “the same,” and it is only by this other and through it that one can assume the self of the ego as “my own,”
The foreignness of the other intersects with the own-ness of the self; the other is on the one hand homogenized, so that I can recognize myself in it, but only at the price of alienating myself in this image of the other — the other is the same as me, my double, and precisely because of that my competitor, my opponent, an intimate enemy who threatens my life and integrity.
And one can, in another quick aside, point to the fact that Levinas took his cue from this same constellation, from the question of “Who is the other?” from the alterity of the other, epitomized strikingly and immediately by his or her face, in a way that cannot be circumvented and that circumscribes the very notion of the self so his whole enterprise hinges massively on the question of the two and how to conceive it, and on the ethics that follows, taking the Other as its guideline. This is his particular way of taking up the question of the two.
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There are two perspectives on this structure.
1.) The first, stemming from Saussure, treats language as a system in which all entities
are differential and oppositive, made of differences. No element has an identity or substance of its own; it is defined only through its difference from others, its whole being is exhausted by its difference, and hence they hang together, they are bound together with an iron necessity of tight interdependence. The symbolic is made of differences, and only of differences — and since it has no firm, substantial hold it can equally and with equanimity be applied to language, kinship, food, myth, clothing — the whole of culture.
2.) But the second perspective, the one that Freud opens up with the unconscious, presents the slide of contingency within this well-ordered system.
The words contingently and erratically sound alike; not ruled by grammar or semantics, they
contaminate each other, they slip, and this is where the unconscious takes the chance of appearing in cracks and loopholes.
The first perspective hinges on necessity, ruled by differentiality, which is what makes linguistics possible.
The second perspective hinges on contingent similarities and cracks and is the nightmare of linguistics, because its logic is quirky and unpredictable; it pertains to what Lacan called linguisterie and lalangue.
So if we have on one hand the Other of the Saussurean structure, or system, then the unconscious represents a bug in the system, the fact that it can never quite work without a bug.
With the unconscious the structure slips.
What was supposed to work as the Other, the bearer of rule and necessity, the guarantee of meaning, shows its other face, which is whimsical and ephemeral and makes meaning slide. The Other is the Other with the bug.
And what is more, it is only the bug that ultimately makes the Other other — the Other is the Other not on account of structure, but because of the bug that keeps derailing it.
The bug is the anomaly of the Other, its face of inconsistency, that which defies regularity and law.
Inside the Other of language, which enables speech, <strong>there emerges another Other that derails speech and makes us say something else than we intended</strong>, derailing the intention of meaning.
Yet the second Other cannot be seized and maintained independently of the first as another Other, the Other within the Other — the Other cannot be duplicated and counted, the bug makes it uncountable.
The alterity of the unconscious is not cut of the stuff of symbolic differences, it opens a difference that is not merely a symbolic difference, but that is, so to speak, “the difference within the difference,” another kind of difference within the symbolic one, a difference recalcitrant to integration into the symbolic, and yet only emerging in its bosom, with no separate realm of its own.
And the very notion of subjectivity pertains precisely to the impossibility of reducing the second difference to the first one.
In other words, the subject that emerges there is premised on a “two,”on the relation to a kernel within the symbolic order that cannot be symbolically sublimated.
So the bottom line would be: there is an irreducible two, an irreducible gap between the One and the Other, and the unconscious, at its minimal, presents the figure of two that are not merged into one.
The problem that remains is that, well, the Other doesn’t exist.