In search of the Other

In the book "Radical Alternity" I start a journey to understand what or who is the Other that people search for, and the process that is correlated to that search. To be completely honest this book was the hardest for me to understand which seems rather odd after "The Ticket that Exploded". So to deal with that problem i decided that the best thing to do so for me to explore the message that author conveyed from my own understanding of it and see where that gets me.

Throughout the book Jean and Marc (the authors) talk a lot about what the Other is and what it/he/she is not, also an example of Japan was used to show what is an Other. To me it seems that the Other in this book is something that we strive to interact with in the case of Japan it is perceived to have "an appearance of proximity and a core that rejects that proximity". So in order to have another there needs to be a distance between the Other and the person, more importantly the distance is measured in the form of alternity rather then anything else. "Alternity is basically the other way of thinking by refusing to think in terms of finiteness" Well for me reading that sentence is a lot easier then grasping its meaning. The secret to alternity is to think that everything comes from the outside the authors say well let me think about that...So to be the Other there needs to be a distance created by the alternity which relies on the idea that it is nothing if itself and comes from the other. Hm...so by thinking that things come from the outside the Other separates itself from its surroundings. I'm pretty lost in all of this so I'll move on to things I understood better.

I liked the concept of the Artificial Stranger because it addressed the interesting fact that it is easier to open up to stranger sometimes then to people we know. The fact that the other person doesn't know you gives you the feeling of security in the sense that no matter how he reacts to your confessions you don't have to have any relations together afterwards so that knowledge of no future correlation makes it easier to share things without the fear of feeling any negative responses from that person in the future. Or knowing that that person isn't a part of your life and therefore by letting him in on your secrets you let go of some stress but protect the privacy of your lifestyle at the same time. The most important part of being that stranger is that there needs to be plenty of distance for there to be that moment of closeness; which is rather interesting.

One of the ways that people distance themselves from each other that i didn't think about before this book is the use of our names. I mean you can have a conversation with someone and never tell them your name and go on never knowing. You can exchange names as a sign of a form of acknowledgement of the other persons existence in your life. Then there is room for manipulation which is the form of interacting with someone while keeping your distance. For example you can lie about your name or last name. But what does that mean? How much of ourselves is in our name? On a basic level its just a couple of letters, but what it really is, is a part of a persons identity. So by giving your name to someone else you are letting the other person start to get to know that identity. Therefore becoming more vulnerable and less distant, less of the Other I guess. "The allusion of identity make connections easier" in the sense that by creating an identity that has some alternity in it one becomes less vulnerable, because that identity doesn't not match the complete truth, thus opening up to others becomes easier. Or so i think.

The last thing I wanted to touch upon in this book is the connection of technology and alternity. "Technology is a way to fall out of the world" the authors say, which is completely true. Since alternity is seeking a way to think in without finiteness, technology strangely enough comes to help with that. You can create new dimensions of the world through film, photography, music and other art. You can live a different life online and explore your identity by trying to be different things on the net. The fact that you feel unidentified on the web gives you a chance to recreate yourself without the fear or other people reactions to it. So technology becomes also a form of an Other that we seek.

Like i mentioned from the very beginning this book was really the hardest for me to understand in a complete sense but i tried and got some further understanding on the subject.