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Others 67 IncompleteStrangers The feeling of slight discomfort that often greets a stranger’s beckoning stems from a breach of boundaries, perhaps even of propriety. “Why are you calling me? I don’t know you.” But when a complete stranger beckons you, he or she ceases to be a complete stranger and becomes, if not exactly an acquaintance, at least an incomplete stranger.“You don’t know me completely but you know the surface of me just as I know the surface of you.” It isn’t hard to see why Romantics would have recoiled in horror at this. This sort of encounter turning into a contact is typically urban. It isn’t premised on the oneness of a deep or transcendent self but on the contingent relationality of selves in transit. The incompleteness of the stranger to me mirrors my incompleteness to him or her.Our meeting doesn’t remedy it (it is neither an illness nor a matter of unfinished business); it acknowledges incompleteness as our shared and permanent condition. But if this doesn’t represent an affective meeting of souls, it isn’t a meeting of minds either. So what kind of knowledge is the knowledge of the incomplete stranger? Seeing the 9/11 flyers and recognizing the dead as our neighbors, or reading Delbo’s rhetoric of nearness with the dead of Auschwitz, we are no longer complete strangers to other people’s experiences of disaster. The sense of our own incompleteness is like the trace left in us, or on us, by a disaster we cannot“really” know. Like all traces, it is an absence that we can see. Lack obliges us toward the other, the alien, and makes us relate to him or her in a meaningful way, but in the mode of difference. If I come to you who beckon me, the space I was occupying will now be empty. But if I was walking down a city street, or any other place defined not by individual ownership but by collective usage, every space that I occupy for a moment and then leave will be filled next by someone other than me yet like me. This interplay of difference and likeness defines the sign and all such substitutions and tropes. In this sense, beckoning understood as faire signe functions as a sort of trope, and this can explain why the portraits at Union Square worked. To beckon means to recognize that a distance exists and then to invite nearness. But nearness only, that is to say, proximity and distance at the same time. Intimation rather than intimacy. ...

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