Interpretation of The Other and the Self
“The question is how you can be a self in an essential relationship with another. The Other makes what I am. First there is the other. The Other looks at me and then I become myself. I am just because the other is there. The self, the autonomous self, can only be there if there is another to confirm it. It is only there in dialogue with the Other. If that dialogue stops then the ego threatens to curtail itself into a rigid, fearful, lonely and ruined selfishness.”[1]
“Your self is being moulded by family, climate, school, etc. But there is a tiny, small part in the core that is the true self.”[2]
“It is not only that there is meaning in the work. That meaning is also the work. It is in the context.”[3]
“Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.”[4]
“If we understand language in a deterministic way, terms and formulations are developed to describe a definite phenomenon, object or topic. Language is understood ad precise and one dimensional, because one word stands for one meaning.”[5]
A concept as a system of rules. So, you can decode a language that you don’t know.
[1] Dirk de Wachter on Levinas, Brainwash
[2] Matjaž Štuk lecture (GRA 2020)
[3] Curdin Tones and Willem van Weelden (GRA 2020)
[4] Barthes
[5] The artistic research: the language issue, SARN, 2014
To me this is really interesting. Also, in relation to the authority of others over you or your work. And whether that is something negative per se.
Is the self a constructed self? Then it all relates back to context again.
But then again, does it matter who the Other is? In what ways he thinks, how he interprets you and your work, which language he speaks?