Radical or Nonexistent Alterity

“The only deep desire is the desire of the object. Not desire for something I am missing, or even for something (or someone) that misses me but for something that does not miss me at all, that is perfectly able to exist without me…The Other is the one who does not miss me, and that is radical alterity” (Radical Alterity, 7).

While Marc Guillaume attributes seduction to alterity, people in general attribute seduction to similarity and dependence. People seek out objects they are able to manipulate, create or reshape in their own image, and find an affinity with. Considering the amount of work applied to non-practical manipulation, it seems like there is an impetus in all humans to change their physical surroundings. By changing our environments to create objects of desire, we are causing those very objects of desire to be dependent on us for their existence. Personally, I like being depended upon. It makes me feel important and needed. Although I realize I have little or no control over certain objects or people, I hardly seek out those objects more than one’s under my immediate control.

Even the objects that myself and others perceive to be beyond the subject’s control could very well be dependent on the subject. In his central argument for idealism, Berkeley contested that ordinary objects are mind dependent since they are merely ideas.

“That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose), cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them.- I think an intuitive knowledge may be obtained of this by any one that shall attend to what is meant by the term exists, when applied to sensible things. The table I write on I say exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed- meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. There was an odour, that is, it was smelt; there was a sound, that is, it was heard; a colour or figure, and it was perceived by sight or touch. This is all that I can understand by these and the like expressions. For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible” (Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, II,i).

Berkeley presents here the following argument (Winkler 1989):

(1) We perceive ordinary objects (houses, mountains, etc.).
(2) We perceive only ideas.
Therefore,
(3) Ordinary objects are ideas.

Although premise two can be contested on the grounds that ideas represent external world objects and thus allow us to perceive them, it is difficult (or perhaps impossible) to demonstrate the existence of an external world object apart from the senses. Since sight is the only supposed access to external world objects, those object’s accessible existence indeed relies on that subject. If Berkeley’s analysis is correct, people could not discover a definitive other. Even if the other existed, we would not have access to it. While Baudrillard and Guillaume use their notion of the other to make other philosophical and practical points and predictions, their underlying assumptions should be explicitly questioned and scrutinized. The other may not even exist; and if it does, it is hardly as seductive as a creation of the self.