ABSTRACT
This chapter maintains that, for philosophers of dialogue and psychoanalytic thinkers, the other is constitutive of the self. It situates these two groups of thinkers in relation to Descartes before going on to explicate their individual ideas, beginning with Martin Buber. Buber distinguishes the I-Thou relation from the I-It relation, privileging the former over the latter. Like Buber, Gabriel Marcel privileges the relation between two people, characterised as a responsive relation, over objective or instrumental relations. Franz Rosenzweig maintains the incontestable priority of multiplicity over the totality and unity that philosophers from Parmenides to Hegel have emphasised. For all these philosophers of dialogue, subjects understand themselves in relation to a dialogical other, a relation that cannot be properly understood by a third party but only within the relation itself. Psychoanalytic thinkers Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva also accord primary importance to the other. For Lacan, infants find themselves structured by their relations to others in three registers: the imaginary, symbolic, and real. Kristeva elaborates linguistic meaning as not only symbolic but also semiotic. She thereby supplements Lacan’s understanding of signification as syntactic by elaborating the more corporeal, poetic aspect of language in tandem with its formal aspects, which she designates semiotic.
