「他者たち」（Hillis Miller）

承前*1

Others

J. Hills Miller Othersの”Introduction”。
先ず、エピグラフとして、デリダの”… l’autre appelle a venir et cela n’arrive qu’a plusieurs voix.”(“Psychee: Invention de l’autre”*2という言葉が引かれる（p.1）。
「最近の文学研究・文化研究において「他者」概念が使われる（略）仕方」――

Most such uses mean by “other” the racial, gendered, or ethnic other. The word is used invidiously to name the way a hegemonic culture or gender group views different and subaltern ones as exotic or inferior or just plain alien, and therefore as something it would be a good idea to erase or assimilate by some form, overtly violent or not, of ethnic cleasening. (ibid.)

それに対して、

(…) I mean by “others” something different, an element of the “completely other” that inhabits even the most familiar and apparently “same,” for example my sense of myself or of my neighbor or my beloved, the “alter ego” within my own home or culture, or my sense of my own culture as such, or my sense of literary and philosophical works that belong to my own culture. Those are, I claim, others to themselves, as well as to “me.” (…) A self may find its own depth, for example its unconscious, other to itself. Or another person may be other. Or another nation or ethnic group may be other, though not necessarily in a way that sees them as subaltern*3. Representations of this otherness have had great diversity. Proust’s Marcel in Remembrance of Things Past finds Albertine’s supposed lesbianism bewilderingly, fascinatingly, other. Jacques Lacan, in a celebrated formula, defined the unconscious as “the discourse of the other.” The notion of the other has great importance, though with a different meaning in each case, in influential theorists like Jacques Derrida, Emanuel Levinas, and Jean-Fraoncois Lyotard. A full repertoire would be more or less interminable. (ibid.)

On the one hand, the other may be another version of the same, in one way or another assimilable, comprehensible, able to be appropriated and understood. On the other hand, the other may be truly and radically other. In the latter case, the other cannot be turned into some version of the same. It cannot be made transparent to the understanding, thereby dominated and controlled. It remains, whatever effort we make to deal with it, irreducibly other. As Jacques Derrida puts this: “Tout autre est tout autre. (Every other is completely other.)”*4 (p.2)

何故複数形なのか；

I have used the plural in my title, “others,” to avoid the implicit personification in speaking in the singular of “the other,” as well as to avoid the assumption that the other is, whether a person or not, necessarily and ascertainably unified, single, whole. When one says “the other” and means the “wholly other,” it is almost impossible to avoid thinking of that other as a person or quasi-person, perhaps an old man with a long grey beard, Joyce’s mad feary father. Why should we beg the question and assume that the other is “one,” and a person to boot? To say “others” disrupts that almost irresistible presumption. It makes of the wholly other possibly a multitudinous murmurous cacophony, like Friedrich Schelegel’s “chaos,” discussed in my first chapter. (…) (p.3)

The wholly other, present everywhere in my various texts and yet absent from any direct encounter, perception, or naming, may be figured as that missing part or member Isis could not find. The other is always there and not there, in a species of ghostly semblance, as my reading will show. (p.4)

*1:http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091126/1259201785

*2:英訳は、”the other calls [something] to come and that does not happen except in multiple voices.”

*3:See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070809/1186627583 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20090410/1239330953

*4:Millerは『アポリア』から引用しているが、この文は「死を与える」にもあり。p.161, 169ff.

死を与える (ちくま学芸文庫)