Heft - Institut für Theorie ith

What, if anything, is the Other? Lacan’s
first answer goes into 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, enabling it to
signify. And if this claim is to be placed
within the general thrust of structuralism,
then 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 Lévi-Straussian
underpinnings. What follows from
there, in the same general thrust, is the
notorious formula that “the unconscious
is structured like a language,” the formula
which points into the same direction
as the other one, that “the unconscious
is the discourse of the Other.” But
what kind of Other is announcing itself
with the structure such that the unconscious
is ruled by it, structured like it?
What Other is the unconscious the discourse
of? It is clear that Freud’s three
inaugurational books, The Interpretation
of Dreams, The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life and the book on jokes,
all single out the unconscious as a series
of “marginal” phenomena which pertain
to language, but which appear as
its slips, its cracks, its short-circuits, its
breaches, its temporary out-of-jointness,
not as something belonging to its
normal, standard and universal use.
They pertain to homonymy, 5 verbal
contaminations, puns, mix-ups, which
all condition what Freud has described
as the process of the work of the unconscious,
to be put under the two broad
headings of “condensation” and “displacement.”
They are condensed and
displaced in relation to the signifying
One of language.
5 - If the quote by Char used by
Foucault placed the history of
men under the banner of a long
succession of synonyms, then
in a first simple view one could
maintain that what contradicts
synonymy can be seen as the
realm of homonymy. Against
the unity of meaning which
can be expressed by different
means while remaining the
same, there is the disruption
of erratic similarity of sounds
which does not heed meaning.
The unconscious, at its minimal,
contradicts synonymy by
homonymy. Could one say:
the one of meaning vs. the two
of homonymy?
Thus we have two perspectives on this
linguistic and more broadly symbolic
structure, which epitomizes the Other.
The first one, stemming from Ferdinand
de Saussure, treats language as a system
in which all entities are di≠erential and
oppositive. None of them has any identity
or substance of its own, they are only
defined by being di≠erent from one
another, their whole being is exhausted
by their being di≠erent, and hence they
cling together, they are bound together
with an iron necessity of tight interdependence.
But the second perspective,
the one that Freud opens up with the
unconscious, opens the slide of contingency
within this well ruled system. The
words contingently and erratically
sound alike, not ruled by grammar or
semantics, they contaminate each other
and reverberate, they slip, and this is
where the unconscious takes its chance
of appearing in cracks and loopholes.
The first perspective hinges on necessity,
ruled by di≠erentiality, and this is
what makes linguistics possible; the
second perspective hinges on contingent
similarities and cracks. It is the
nightmare of linguistics, for its logic is
quirky and unpredictable. It pertains to
what Lacan has called “linguisterie”
and “lalangue.” It pertains to what
Alfred Jarry, the immortal Jarry of Le
roi Ubu, has called pataphysics, the science
which, as opposed to metaphysics,
deals with the exception, the contingent,
the non-universal.
So if we have on the one hand the Other
of the Saussurean structure, or system,
then the unconscious presents rather a
bug in this system, the fact that it can
never quite work without a bug. 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 whimsy
and ephemeral and which makes the
meaning slide. The Other is the Other
with the bug. And what is more, this is
what makes the Other Other – not the
structure but the bug which 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, there emerges another Other,
which derails speech and makes us say
something else, or something more
than we intended. Yet these anomalies,
these slips and cracks, do not form
another system, they do not amount to
another Other which would give rise to
a parallel system, doubling the first
Other as something which would be
more radically and “really” Other. This
is the point of Lacan’s thesis, another
one of his proverbs, that “there is no
Other of the Other.” The Other of the
bug (of the unconscious) is not the Other
of the Other of language and structure,
they share the same location. The
second Other cannot be seized and
maintained independently as another
Other, the Others cannot be duplicated
and counted. 6 Yet, given that there is
no Other of the Other, it would still be
misguided to say that there is only one
Other, since it is not to be counted as
One. It is cracked and haunted by lack,
pestered by a bug, and this is precisely
what makes it the Other. There may be
no Other of the Other, but this does not
make the Other one. The bug makes it
uncountable.
The unconscious opens up an alterity
within the Other which is of a di≠erent
order than the symbolic Other and its
di≠erentiality. It presents a moment of
heterogeneity within the homogeneity
of di≠erences that constitute the symbolic.
The structuralist structure was
based on the “univocity of di≠erence,” as
it were, on the postulate that di≠erences
can be predicated homogenously, univocally,
in the same way for each element,
which was only made of di≠erences. But
the alterity of the unconscious is not cut
of the stu≠ of di≠erentiality, it opens a
di≠erence which is not merely a symbolic
di≠erence, but which is, so to speak,
di≠erent from di≠erence itself. It is a
“di≠erence within the di≠erence,” another
kind of di≠erence within the symbolic
one, a di≠erence recalcitrant to integration
into the symbolic, and yet only
emerging in its bosom, with no separate
realm of its own.
6 - Which also means that there
cannot be a dialectics of the
Other. In Hegelian terms the
Other would be something
that redoubles itself and thus
reflexively sublates itself,
which would entail the
“Aufhebung,” the sublation of
the Other, its self-mediation
with One, the alienation of One
in the Other and then its
return – by way of the Other
of the Other – to the initial One.
This seeming radicalization
of the Other would amount to
its neutralization.
86