Jacques Lacan, the french psychoanalyst and psychiatrist that I touched on briefly in a previous post, is a Freudian that focuses a lot on language, the unconscious, ego and the self. In The Agency of the Letter..., despite being Freudian, he refutes Freud's idea of the unconscious as instinctual, suggesting that "the unconscious is structured like a language". It is not separate from the conscious, or an 'other' of the conscious, but as complex and structured as the conscious itself. In fact, it is so sophisticated that it is "the discourse of the Other", and therefore the "locus in which speech is constituted".
There is a distinction between Other and other that must not be confused, however. The little other is simply a reflection of the ego; its not really even an other at all and is actually something like another "I". It seems as if Lacan is suggesting that there is someone thinking in our place and that is a metonymic chain of significations that represents our identities. But, the big Other is a completely other idea. It is representative of our unconscious, which is the recognition of our desire and vice versa. He goes on further to say that it connects or other and ourselves.
This is such a compelling concept, considering what the word "Other" actually signifies. Particularly in post colonial studies, the "Other" is something that is obviously, not ourselves - when we are describing the other, we are actually identifying who we are not based on the characteristics (like ethnicity) that we are. Without the "Other", we cannot define ourselves because we have nothing to compare ourselves to. For example, I don't know that I am white until I see a black person to compare myself to; this realization comes with the concept of otherness and binary opposition. But the point is, the word "Other" represents something that is not ourselves - so why does Lacan suggest that the Other is a part of ourselves?
In the Second Sex, french female existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, argues that women have been defined as the "Other", relative to men in the same way that slaves were othered by their slave-owners. Further, she says, "humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself, but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being", and further, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other." She also points out that Julien Benda, a french philosopher in his Rapport d’Uriel, states that "Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man" - she wants significance by herself, but cannot attain it. My question is, does this lack of autonomy of the other, mean that they are really part of something else - that being ourselves?
Could she have possibly gotten this idea of autonomy from Descartes and Lacan? Descartes, in saying, "I think, therefore I am", suggests that the "I" is no longer autonomous. Our thinking process doesn't happen autonomously; it is determined socially and as a product of our culture - our desire, that is. Lacan suggests, "I think where I am not; therefore, I am where I do not think" - thus, the real me is beyond my thinking. So, maybe all others are the same.
Random information -- Simon de Beauvoir and Jacques Lacan probably knew each other. They were all hanging out in Paris in the 1950s. There is a rather nit-picky debate between Jean Paul Sartre (who was de Beauvoir's partner) and Lacan about the sense of the other/Other. My interpretation of this debate is that for Sartre, de Beauvoir, and some postcolonial theoriests such as Edward Said, "Other" with a capital "O" is the sexual and racial difference. But for Lacan, that is the small-cased other, and the capital "O" Other is something beyond signification and is linked to a lack in the subject doing the "othering."
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