Page 163 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

of the relationship of the binary are forged together. The master is inseparable from
the slave, the identities of men are interlocked with those of women and the
subjectivity of the colonial ruler is forged in tandem with the colonized subject.
140 Indeed, the discussion of Orientalism presented by Said contains one of the better
known uses of the concept of the Other. Here what constitutes the Orient is a
projection by Western powers onto the empty subject position of the Other.
The idea of the Other also appears in the psychoanalytic work of Lacan, where
it appears as a symbolic place and the site on which the subject is constituted. For
Lacan the unconscious is the discourse of the Other formed at the moment of the
subject’s constitution via entry into the symbolic order. The Other is ‘the lack’ (loss
of pre-Oedipal oneness) experienced as a consequence of the formation of the
subject and is thus the source of desire. An uncapitalized use of ‘the other’ also
appears in Lacan’s work as the figure of wholeness or oneness that a child
encounters during the mirror phase.

Links Difference, identity, Oedipus complex, Orientalism, psychoanalysis, subjectivity