Guest Lecture with Mladen Dolar: The Other

The concept of the other/Other is one of the central categories of the legacy of French structuralism and presents one of the key “French traveling concepts” that have found a broad spread and application in a vast number of areas. I want to focus on the distinction other/Other, introduced by Jacques Lacan, which presents a crucial inflection in the history and genealogy of this concept. It was in May 1955, in the course of his Seminar II, that Lacan introduced this distinction: “There are two others, at least two – an Other with a capital O, and another with a small o, which is the ego. The Other is what is at stake in the function of speech.” The distinction proposes an opposition between our relation to others as our fellow human beings, our mutuality and recognition as well as hostility, and on the other hand the Other of speech, structure, authority upholding language, universal discourse etc. This opposition for Lacan coincides with two other oppositions, between the ego and the subject, and between the imaginary and the symbolic. From this initial insight there followed massive further ramifications, indeed a major paradox of psychoanalysis: on the one hand, the Other turned into its central category, as epitomized by Lacan’s famous adages ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’, ‘desire is the desire of the Other’ etc., so that being agitated by the Other at our core presents both the instance of our alienation (not being masters in our own house, as Freud put it) and a place of a precarious truth as a lever of emancipation. On the other hand, Lacan maintained that the Other is inconsistent, that there is essentially a lack in the Other, ultimately that the Other doesn’t exist (l’Autre manque etc.), which poses a simple question: how can the essential instance on which the psychoanalytic entities depend ultimately not exist? In a further ramification of this notion Lacan posited in Seminar XX: “The Other, in my parlance, cannot be anything else but the Other sex,” which places the question of the Other in relation to the sexual difference.

Two questions will be pursued at the end: the question of the ethical stance that follows from this distinction other/Other, and the diagnosis of our times which is frequently formulated as the decline or the withering away of the instance of the Other. (I can add that my recent book Rumors centrally deals with the latter question.)

Mladen Dolar is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German idealism and art theory. He has lectured extensively at universities in the USA and across Europe. He is the author of over 150 papers in scholarly journals and collected volumes. Apart from fifteen books in Slovene, his book publications in English most notably include A Voice and Nothing More (MIT 2006, translated into ten languages), Opera's Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001, also translated into several languages), and Rumors (Polity 2024). He is one of the founders of what has become known as the ‘Ljubljana Lacanian School’.

The lecture is part of a symposium on the concept of l’autre, organized by the research network Histories and Futures of French Travelling Concepts, in collaboration with the Higher Seminars in Literary Studies and History of Ideas at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics. The lecture is open to the public and requires no registration.

Histories and Futures of French Travelling Concepts

26 August: Poetry and the Other (or, why political extremists rarely create great art) by Mara Lee