I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about otherness recently, trying to tie together various thoughts, borrowing from Lacan, Levinas, Delueze, Guattari, Focault, my own spiritual journey, and, of course, others.

My thoughts all remain someone unclear and disorganized. This is at least my third attempt to try and organize clarify them into a blog post, but I expect, instead, it will be more like random, incompletely partially related thoughts, with no clear beginning of end.

One idea I’m grappling with is Lacan’s L’Objet Petit a, the unobtainable object of desire, with its echoes of Melanie Klein’s object relations and Winnicott’s transitional object. Related to this is the Le grand Autre, which I have even less of an understanding of.

In my mind, Le grand Autre is somehow connected to collective memory, to official history, orthodoxy, the agreed upon master narrative. This leads me to Foucault and counter memory, and perhaps through that, back to Lacan and L’Objet Petit a. We connect with one another sharing our stories of the hidden unobtainable desires, and it becomes a counter memory, an antithesis to the dominant collective memory, and ultimately the two become synthesized into a new collective memory.

I think of this in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Rhizome. All our L’Objet Petit as connected to collective memory and counter memory, constantly evolving, shifting.

Somewhere in all of this is alterity, with a nod to Levinas, our sense of self and not self in this great dance. As I try to wrap my head around this, I stumble across Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume’s Radical Alterity. The MIT Press page about the book asks, “Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism?”

My thoughts move to my spiritual journey, my discussion with my bishop about embracing otherness, our discussion of Christ’s otherness, fully human and fully divine. Fully self and fully other? How do I embrace otherness? Otherness of people different from myself, whether it be Donald Trump, or the homeless man on the street?

“Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism?”

I’m reading Slow Church right for one study group. The book challenges the much of the discussions about church growth, but it feels like it is just another angle of the same insular cultural narcissism. I’m also reading The Monastery of The Heart for a different study group. A Benedictine based rule of life seems much more other, much more of a challenge to cultural narcissism.

These are all still random thoughts in the early phase of formation. I worry that to the extent I’m still scratching my head over all of this, it may seem even more obtuse to many reading it.

Yet I put it out there. Does any of what I’m saying make sense to you? Does it spur thoughts in your mind? Do you have insights that might help me out?