Postmodern theories of Alterity and identity

« desires; rather, it indicates that the self desires only as the Other and thus cannot recognize the object of its desire.

The self is, as it were, a detour in the trajectory of the desire of the Other.

Lacan's theory of desire arrivesat a conundrum: how can we understand the fact that subjects desire very specific objects? He invented the term'object a' (where the 'a' stands for autre , 'other') in response to this question.

Such objects are distinguished by the fact that 'they have no specular image, or, in other words, alterity' ( 'Subversion of the Subject' , in Lacan 1977 ).

When Lacan counts the subject of consciousness among these 'other objects', he makes the question of self-identity considerably more complicated, for, on the one hand, the self is constituted by misidentifying itself withits specular image, and, on the other, it has no specular image but is only, as Lacan says, a 'shadow'.

Onetrenchant response to the complications generated by Lacan's attempt to understand the specificity of objects ofdesire can be found in the work of Julia Kristeva , especially in her Powers of Horror (1982).

Kristeva articulates the Lacanian analysis of alterity into three distinct moments - the Other, the alter ego , and the 'other' as object of desire - by concentrating on what cannot be captured by a dialectics of desire: the utterly undesirable or 'abject'.The self experiences abjection when it senses an undefinable 'something' that precedes, inhabits, and threatens toengulf it.

For this reason, the abject is violently - but also only incompletely - expelled: I experience abjection onlyif an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be 'me'.

Not at all an other with whom I can identify andincorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be.(Kristeva 1982: 10 ) Certain categories of religious discourse such as defilement, abomination and purification can be understood, according to Kristeva, in terms of abjection.

Once the abject is excluded, it serves as the foundation ofan always precarious culture within which objects of desire can be separated from one another.

3 The experience of alterity The writings of Lacan and Kristeva are as much contributions to psychoanalytic practice as independent theoretical exercises.

Yet the questions to which they are addressed - the dialectics of desire, the experience ofthe alterity of the self - have also been posed by Emmanuel Levinas from a very different perspective.

While studying the work of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas came to realize that the phenomenology of the other cannotbe accomplished in the same manner as the phenomenology of consciousness or the hermeneutics of existence.Levinas opens his most extensive work, Totality and Infinity (1969), by defining desire as 'desire for the absolutely other'.

Because every object is inadequate to desire, its meaning must lie in the 'alterity of the Other [ autrui ]'.

The phenomenological elucidation of the autrui (the 'personal' other) cannot simply be a matter of theoretical attitudes and descriptions because the autrui is never a definable theme.

Instead of grounding philosophy on the cogito , Levinas returns to Descartes' discussion of 'the idea of infinity' as that which 'overflows' every intentional state.Totality and Infinity then presents subjectivity 'as welcoming the Other, as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consummated' ( 1969 ).

Not only is the totality of entities to be distinguished from the totally other, so too is the phenomenon from the face: in the naked face of the autrui the idea of infinity overflows consciousness and its objects.

The other can never be reduced to the same - not to the identity of the cogito (epistemology) nor to the sameness of being (ontology) - and so ethics becomes, for Levinas, 'first philosophy'.

In his second major work,Otherwise than Being (1981), Levinas no longer speaks of subjectivity as hospitality but as hostage: the self is not only held hostage by the other, but, as a hostage, it also 'substitutes' - and thus takes responsibility - for the otherwho holds it hostage.

This paradoxical responsibility cannot be represented in terms of a self-positing subject, for,as the term 'hostage' indicates, the self is from the start sheer passivity: The uniqueness of the ego, overwhelmedby the other in proximity, is the other in the same, the psyche.

But it is I, I and no one else, who am hostage forthe others.

In substitution my being that belongs to me and not to another is undone, and it is through thissubstitution that I am not 'another', but me.

(1981: 116 ) It is only because the self is assigned to the other before it acts on its own that it can be itself, that is, singular.

Throughout his writing Levinas discovers an unmediatedalterity in every identity: the vulnerability, susceptibility and 'nudity' of the self is evidence of such alterity.

Forphilosophy to come to terms with evidence of this kind it must abandon idealism as well as empiricism and revise itsnotions of experience and sensibility.

Experience does not consist in subsuming mental representations undergeneral terms but in taking responsibility for the other and exposing oneself to one's own alterity.

Although the workof Gilles Deleuze could hardly be more different in tone and texture than that of Levinas, he too seeks to revise philosophical concepts of experience and sensibility, and, like Levinas, his programme takes its point of departurefrom a critique of all claims to identity.

But unlike Levinas, he does not undertake this critique as an advocate, so tospeak, of the transcendence of the other but as a champion of entirely immanent 'differential forces'.

Whereas Kanttreats identity and difference as concepts of reflection, Deleuze tries to develop a concept of difference in which itis no longer a term of reflection and can no longer be seen as the opposite of identity.

Difference, for Deleuze,always implies a multiplicity of relations among positive forces, each of which expresses itself but none of whichopposes any other.

According to the terms set forth in Difference and Repetition (1981), every 'philosophy of representation' rests on a principle of identity.

The reduction of difference to opposition serves to make singularities- and, for Deleuze, everything is a singularity - into representations of generic types.

Every philosophy ofrepresentation denies difference in favour of identity and thus turns into a philosophy of negation.

Difference mustbe negated in order to save the self-identical subject, even if - as in the case of Hegelianism - this negation isdoubled, and the subject appears only as the negation of everything that opposes it.

All of Deleuze's writingsemphasize the positivity of difference.

Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1977 ), perhaps his best-known book, not only attacks psychoanalysis for conceiving of desire in terms of castration (lack of the phallus) but seeks toundermine every conception of desire as absence or negativity.

The question then arises: how can one account foralterity without using concepts such as lack, absence or negativity? The concluding sections of Difference and Repetition respond to this question.

Sensible differences, according to Deleuze, are always differences of intensity: 'Intensity is the form of difference in so far as this is the reason of the sensible' ( 1994: 222 ).

In order for an intensity to be experienced, it must first be developed or 'explicated'.

But an intensity (a quale ) cannot be explicated unless it is transformed into an extension (a quantity) in accordance with a specific principle of identity.The 'psychic system I-Self' is one particularly complicated version of explication.

The other enters into Deleuze'sphilosophical scenario as the site of still unexplicated intensities.

Instead of using words like 'negativity' or 'absence'. »