Comparative Literature Studies

Bush, Christopher, 1968-
The Other of the Other?: Cultural Studies, Theory, and the Location of the Modernist Signifier
Comparative Literature Studies - Volume 42, Number 2, 2005, pp. 162-180

Penn State University Press

Christopher Bush - The Other of the Other?: Cultural Studies, Theory, and the Location of the Modernist Signifier - Comparative Literature Studies 42:2 Comparative Literature Studies 42.2 (2005) 162-180 The Other of the Other?: Cultural Studies, Theory, and the Location of the Modernist Signifier Christopher Bush Princeton University Partons de la conception de l'Autre comme du lieu du signifiant. Tout énoncé d'autorité n'a d'autre garantie que son énonciation même, car il est vain qu'il le cherche dans un autre signifiant, lequel d'aucune façon ne saurait apparaître hors de ce lieu. Ce que nous formulons à dire qu'il n'y a pas de métalangage qui puisse être parlé, plus aphoristiquement : qu'il n'y a pas d'Autre de l'Autre. [Let us start from the conception of the Other as the place of the signifier. Any statement of authority has no other guarantee than its very enunciation, for it is pointless for it to seek it in another signifier, which could not appear outside this place in any way. Which is what we mean in saying that there is no metalanguage that can be spoken, or, more aphoristically, that there is no Other of the Other.] --Jacques Lacan Internal otherness: a paradigm and a qualification The Other has passed into critical ubiquity less as a phenomenological-existential problem than as the problem of cultural difference. And yet the various registers of the word are never quite distinct from one another: when speaking of the Other, it sometimes...