The specter of the other

How can the other, a subject of rights, become a threatening figure? A reflection born from a confrontation with reality, beyond the fantasies and prejudices that our fears construct.

The genesis of the fantasy of the other as a threat

My starting point was an experience that was both singular and in fact universal, lived within the framework of my work with students. This was a first for me, even though I have been teaching in higher education for almost 35 years. I found myself facing discontent, a wave of contestation that destabilized me. Beyond the objective reasons for the grievances (I was delivering a discourse of freedom and autonomy to people who, for a certain number of them, needed norms to reassure themselves), it was the dynamic of interaction that established itself that questioned me, quite deeply. Gradually, dialogue broke down on my end and gave way to a wall of incomprehension. On my side, a feeling of threat was growing, fed by my own preconceptions and, I must admit, by a muted fear of their judgment, of their collective force. The group of students ceased to be a collection of individuals to become a single entity, hostile and indistinct. I think they didn’t see it too much, because I have “experience” as they say, but the feelings in me were strong, and this taught me something, which I share here.

It was in this crucible of anxiety that I began, without even being fully aware of it, to forge what I call “mental characters.” The discontented student was no longer Pierre or Sarah, with a history, sensitivity and reasons of their own; they became the archetype of the protester, a figure simplified to the extreme, deprived of their complexity and humanity. On one hand, I projected, due to the fairly large group (about thirty people), a homogeneity of reactions, while each individual was actually in a singular relationship with me (not all were critical), and on the other hand, in doing so I projected the potential reactions of the other, whom I caricatured, made predictable in my imagination, therefore, in a certain way, less real. I removed them from my field of shared humanity to make them a disturbing instance, an object of my internal fantasy rather than a subject acting in the world. This dehumanization, even subtle, is in fact the first step toward disrespect for dignity, and I found myself plunged into it, even though I position myself politically at the opposite.

As the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas analyzed, the fundamental ethical encounter occurs in the face-to-face, in the vulnerability of the face of the other that calls me to infinite responsibility. Yet, what I was creating, and what digital platforms can amplify, is precisely the erasure of this face in favor of a mask, a specter that I was fashioning myself.

The disappearance of mental characters

The tipping point of this ordeal was neither a victory nor a defeat, but a simple return to reality. After a break, a class that I didn’t go to teach, because I no longer wanted this relationship, gradually through the following classes, where sometimes I invited other people from elsewhere, who made me see the situation differently, little by little, a gentle deconstruction of my fantasy took place. The mental characters that had built up in my mind, and that worried me outside of classes, gradually deflated in the face of the simple evidence of human presence, and of links rewoven with individuals, singular ones, whom I made the effort to look at as such. The confrontation with physical reality, with the voice, the gaze, the hesitations of my interlocutors, cracked my monolithic caricatures. The threatening entity fragmented again into a plurality of singular individuals.

This “fall” was a lesson in humility and lucidity. It allowed me to understand that fantasy cannot resist the test of encounter, if we decide to risk changing our perspective. The other, when maintained at a distance, whether physical or psychological, is a screen onto which we project our own fears. By meeting them, by making the effort to reopen ourselves, we are forced to recognize their share of unpredictability, their irreducible complexity, in short, their alterity. The philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted on the concept of “plurality” as a fundamental condition of political and human life: we live on earth not with the Human in the singular, but with men and women, in their infinite diversity. My mental characters were a negation of this plurality; my effort to rediscover encounter was its restoration.

This return to reality had nothing magical about it; it was the fruit of a conscious effort, that of suspending my judgment and accepting to be vulnerable. Accepting to listen, truly, is accepting that my own perspective is not absolute and that the other’s discontent may have a legitimacy that my anxiety prevented me from seeing. It is this work, this craftsmanship of relationship, that constitutes the heart of respect for dignity. It is not about an abstract recognition of rights, but about a concrete commitment to see the human behind the function, the opinion, or the conflict. As Paul Ricœur said, there is a necessity of “translation” in every human relationship, a constant effort to move from one world of meaning to another.

Rebuilding shared humanity: the ethics of relationship as cultural right

This personal experience resonates importantly with the field of cultural rights. I was all the more destabilized because I have carried cultural rights, that is, respect for the dignity of persons, at the heart of my practices since always, and there I felt within me that the link had been broken. How can we guarantee this access and this respect if we are incapable of seeing the other other than through the distorting prism of our prejudices and our fears? The creation of “mental characters” is a symbolic violation of these rights, because it denies the other the richness and validity of their own cultural and personal universe.

The real challenge is therefore, in my view, to cultivate an ethics of relationship, to make encounter a political and civic exercise. This involves creating spaces, in education, in cultural institutions, in public debate, where confrontation (in the noble sense of standing “face to face”) is not only possible but encouraged. It is about learning to debate without dehumanizing, to disagree without denying the dignity of the adversary, to welcome oppositions without taking refuge in fear. This is the strongest antidote to social fragmentation and the polarization that poorly employed algorithms and identity withdrawals constantly nourish. I have experienced through my lived experience that respect for the dignity of the other is not a fact, but a permanent conquest, a battle within oneself against our own demons.

This immense and essential work of respecting the dignity of persons now appears to me even more as a daily practice, both demanding and liberating. My experience with these students was a difficult ordeal, but it reminded me that removing the other from my “field of humanity” is above all a way of impoverishing myself, of cutting myself off from the infinite richness of reality. Recognizing the dignity of the other is accepting to let my certainties be shaken, it is welcoming my fears as belonging to me, it is consenting to the complexity of the world. And it is perhaps there that the very foundation of all democratic life and all truly human culture lies.