Reimagining Subject-Other Relations: Embracing the other Without and Within

This study analyses literary depictions of subject-other relations through representative post-World War II Western literature. Such relations have been negatively impacted by a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a phrase coined by French Philosopher Paul Ricœur to refer to thinkers Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche who, he argued, were shaped by “suspicion[s] concerning the illusions of consciousness” (34). Contextualized within a larger body of theoretical work (Patrick O’Donnell, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Teresa Brennan, Joanna Zylinkska), the project explores both the symptoms as well as the “epidemic nature of contemporary paranoia” as represented in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, and Dione Brand’s Inventory (O’Donnell vii). While the literary and generic structures, aesthetic approaches, and historical contexts for the texts chosen are varied, they each trace the “cultural epidemiology” of paranoia over the last seven decades, weighing the consequences of paranoia’s transformation into a prescription (O’Donnell vii-viii). In so doing, they highlight how paranoia has been normalized as a response “for us, as national, corporate, historical subjects in” time periods “beset by questions about their cohesion and continuance” (O’Donnell 16). Whether through satire, parody, or hyperbole, these texts confront readers with the consequences of the internalization of and complicity with said fear and paranoia as responses to an unknown other, highlighting the need for more ethical subject-other relations. Through their political, cultural, and historical “inventories,” these writers illustrate how the subject has been interpolated into a patriarchal system that keeps them locked into a cycle of fear and hatred that, if allowed to continue, will only lead to ongoing violence. Instead, this study imagines subject-other relations based on care, trust, and love. Such relations are life-affirming – mindful of the fragile connections that hold humans together in kinship. By imagining such possibilities for a non-colonizing relation between self and other, this project explores imagined spaces that do not “will another empire,” but instead show how to take “history’s pulse / measured with another hand” (Brand 11).