Other

The other or constitutive other is a key concept in psychology and philosophy where it is often considered to be what defines or even constitutes the self (see self (psychology), self (philosophy), and self-concept) and other phenomena and cultural units: "What appear to be cultural units--human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations--are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or 'other' through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is 'privileged' or favored, and the other is devalued in some way." (Cahoone 1996). Emmanuel Levinas, on the other hand, saw apprehension of the other as the basis for ethics, and as a limit on ontology.

The poet Arthur Rimbaud may be the earliest to express this idea: "Je est un autre" [I is other]. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science phrased it thus: "You are always a different person." Ferdinand de Saussure described language as, in Calvin Thomas' words, a "differential system without positive terms". Jacques Lacan argued that ego-formation occurs through mirror-stage misrecognition, and his theories where applied to politics by Althusser. Also see Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler. (Thomas 2000)

According to Warner (1990) "the modern system of sex and gender would not be possible without a disposition to interpret the difference between genders as the difference between self and Other...having a sexual object of the opposite gender is taken to be the normal and paradigmatic form of an interest in the Other or, more generally, others." Thus according to Warner, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis hold the heterosexist view that if one is attracted to people of the same gender as one's self one fails to distinguish self and other, identification and desire, and is "regressive" or an "arrested" function. He further argues that heteronormativity covers its own narcissist investments by projecting or displacing them on queerness.

Bibliography

• Foucault, Michel (1990). The History of Sexuality vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.
• Derrida, Jacques (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
• Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
• Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge.

See also subject-object problem.

Sources

• Thomas, Calvin, ed. (2000). "Introduction: Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation", Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252068130.
• Cahoone, Lawrence (1996). From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
• Rimbaud, Arthur (1966). "Letter to Georges Izambard", Complete Works and Selected Letters. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974). The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de (1986). Course in General Linguistics. Eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court.
• Lacan, Jacques (1977). Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.
• Althusser, Louis (1973). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Montly Review Press.
• Warner, Michael (). "Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality", Engendering Men, p.191. Eds. Boone and Cadden.