Edge Duality: Navigating the Boundaries Between “I” and “Other”
Under the water in Panamá, with some fish and a starfish on the border of the sand. Photo by Beatriz L. Botero. 2021.
The most powerful border of all is built in the intricate dance between mother figure and newborn. This is where the concepts of “I” and “other” are born, where the roots and their psychic rhizomes connect and develop.¹ Process that never ends.
This first relationship is a closed dyad, perfect symbiosis. The person who feeds and the person who receives nutrition are one body. The infant introjects the mother's body as part of the narcissism, the Totality. Only with a gradual process that weaves between recognition and differentiation can the infant understand independence and achieve a sense of self. This process of self-discovery is slow and is nourished by the mother's reflection and response to the baby's actions and emotions. This provides the basis for an emerging sense of identity and security; and very important: establishes the ability to trust.
The process goes through the “mirror stage” described by Jacques Lacan: at this moment, the baby perceives itself in front of the mirror, and the mother and father, with the enigmatic smile and their certainty of distance in front of the baby, that is, from their own thoughts, feelings and desires, helps the infant differentiate and understand that is a unique individual.² This distancing allows for meaningful connections with others.
The second fundamental border for the functioning of human beings in society is the one that separates reality from fiction. While we sleep every night, during REM cycles we enter the world of dreams. It is a universe with its own laws such as “non-contradiction” where no one is surprised by the absurdities where the presence of the living and the dead or beings from different parts of the planet can cohabit in improbable spaces. For the adult to enter into this parallel world needs to use imagination and fantasy. In the infant we have play. The adult can get there, for example, through art. The artist, unlike the psychotic who can reach that universe from mental illness, can enter, and leave the imaginary and creative world at will.
The border between reality and fiction has been explored in different directions from literature and the arts. The distance of the triangle that is formed between the person who writes, the person who reads and the narrative that connects the third angle, must be understood as an edge in the form of a strip, a space that speaks of the internal and the external. Baroque art, for example, places its emphasis on flow and change; this fear of latent emptiness suggests that identities are not fixed, but evolve. The baroque explains very well the inextricable relationship between Latin America and its artistic representations. For Alejo Carpentier, America is a continent in which a “complete inventory of its cosmogonies” has not yet been established when he describes the importance of the baroque in Magical Realism (a mix between the wonderful and the real for Carpentier).
For Albert Béguin, European romanticism - a renewed form of the baroque - speaks of a lost of that Totality to which one must aspire. This requires a dissolution with nature. Hence the importance of taking care of it. Both art forms challenge the rigid separation between “I” and “other” and emphasize the interconnectedness of all things in union with the Whole.
There are other areas in which the border between the “I” and the “other” are important. Especially for the ideologies - imaginary constructions - in which we are immersed as Harari explains in Sapiens. Among them, the political sphere and postcolonial theories that speak of hierarchical power structures stand out.
In the political sphere, the concepts of "I" and "other" have been used to analyze power structures and social dynamics, for example, when thinking about human migrations, the "other" is often constructed as what opposite to the "I", representing difference, abnormality and threat. This construction can lead to marginalization, discrimination, and even violence against those considered "other." David Gerber in his work on migration portrays three problems that have to do with the rejection of the “other”: Anti-foreignerism, fear of job shortages for those who are already in a vulnerable position, and the middle class and high who want to maintain the status quo of their well-being. This desire to maintain what already exists can be seen in postcolonial theory, where the term “other” has been used to justify colonialist practices, a place where the colonized are portrayed as inferior and in need of civilization by the colonizer. Similarly, feminist scholars have examined how the concept of the “other” has been used to subjugate women, defining them as different from and inferior to men.
In the contemporary world, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), the boundaries between reality and fiction are becoming increasingly blurred. AI-powered technologies can create hyper-realistic simulations and create a false idea of reality. The idea of the multiverse with its enormous potential may allow a more holistic look at the human being.
With this dichotomy, philosophy points in other directions. Philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and the idea of “Face” or Byung-Chul Han (without being considered part of cosmopolitanism),³ along with Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah have challenged this narrow view of the “I” and the “other” by advocating an approach that emphasizes our shared humanity and moral obligations -human beings are members of a single community-. Cosmopolitanism, in this sense, requires recognition of the fundamental value and dignity of all individuals, regardless of their cultural origin, beliefs or identity. A global community is declared where individuals are not categorized into dichotomies between “I” and “other,” but are seen as interconnected members of a shared humanity. By embracing cosmopolitan ideals, we can move beyond the limitations of the “I”-“other” binary and foster a more just and equitable world.
These concepts must be evidenced in all possible areas, as they can open us to a broader and more nuanced understanding of our relationship with the “other” and that is precisely what we find in this issue of the LACIS REVIEW magazine.
There are groups of people who are interested in keeping the concepts of “I” and “other” separate, as demonstrated by the article from the collective research work led by Farías, which studies the way in which the right in Spain and Latin America (specific case of Peru) uses rhetorical forms to warn others to consider feminist ideas as important for gender equality in these countries.
Other works, on the contrary, explore the edges by blurring them, understanding the “I” in relation to “others” including animals, plants, spiritual geological formations, lakes, rivers. The indigenous universe of Mexico (Aruxes in Beilin), or in Bolivia the existence of the ayllu as McNabb explains it to us, or the Pacha as it appears in Guzmán's text. They talk about the connectivity between the parts with the Whole.
The map whose edges were clear and delimited on the paper, offers new readers no longer an obtuse limit, but is expected to be a strip, or as Anzaldúa explains it, a third space where differences intersect, so that you can navigate on the natural edge. This edge is deciphered, no longer on paper, but within an extension of land: a strip, with its own biology (Corzo). Those who live on the edge of the map are, to a certain extent, abandoned by the centralized governments that dedicate their forces to the big problems of the metropolises and leave the indigenous communities that inhabit those areas to their fate, as Chaparro's article explain: exposing the precariousness of the place and the communities on the border.
On this same border of the map and control are the maroon communities, as read in the article on the subject in the Dominican Republic (Leonardo), but any space that invites human freedom could be included. This crossing the border allows us to think about the experience of the migrant, from the categories of “I” and “other” as we can read in the auto-ethnographic experience of people who come from Puerto Rico (Bird-Soto) or Mexico (Punguil), giving way to the ability to weave stories in the face of traumatic experience. Through the fabric that speaks of individual memory (Nelson) or group memory (Nace, Kallenborn) identity can be manufactured. Nelson exemplifies with his work and that of other weavers around the world the importance of honoring the past and Nace questions the reference to the market and consumption when using artisanal fabric from marginal communities.
If the space of the map can contain habitable space, - as Jorge Luis Borges knew well - time can also do so: the Greek classics continue to be present in contemporary literature as Nelsestuen explains, transcending time and space through the power of the word. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, as Marugán explains, the word enunciates the missing subject but never completes the absence.
In some texts in LACIS REVIEW, there is a reconnection with the diffuse border of reality and fiction. Metafiction, or metatextuality, is rethought with genres such as cinema (Louie, Gonzalez-Espresati Clement, Martínez) where the edge is essentially a space of creation. Translation also crosses the edge of language as it tries to replicate the feeling with symmetry, without thinking only about the exact words of literality and this is what the act of translating poetry does as it appears in the text of DiPriete and Alegría.
Words and things also bring the symbology of our time, and here Brown's work explains this edge from the production and use of tequila as a bridge between cultures. We know that the edge is necessary, because in the world no two things can be the same, says Sánchez Gumiel, when he approaches the analysis of the aesthetics of Jorge Luis Borges (intuiting the virtual world) and thus makes us see the transfer of this edge known in beings like Funes the Memorioso, or we could also say of Johanes Dalhmann in The South or of Pierre Menard himself and his Don Quixote or even the same objects of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius that operate under inconceivable laws.
We can also see this tension that the edge contains in writings about literature, specifically in what Ruiz-Mautino calls a “Psycho-symbolic” reality in the literature of the realistic Mexican writer Luisa Josefina Hernández. Who wanted to break the schemes of women founded on the Catholic image of the Virgin Mary, but also on the tears of Mary Magdalene as shown in her work Pulla-Francia.
In the articles by Shulemburg and Rojas you can perceive a bit of optimism about this idea of the border between the “I” and the “other”, when the former says that literature has the power to “stimulate a collective national reckoning in terms of navigating the frontier of hate and forgiveness” and Rojas who says that it is necessary “to rethink democratic norms to promote depolarization without stifling social change. We need to develop communication systems that harness the power of network communications without giving in to propaganda and misinformation,” giving the examples of investigative journalism consortia such as Bellingcat.
Overall, I could say that this issue of LACIS REVIEW highlights the complex and dynamic nature of the boundary between “I” and “other”, emphasizing its fluidity and permeability in the face of the contemporary world and our changing understanding of identity. Today, a more nuanced approach to the concept of the “other” is required, one that recognizes our shared humanity and the interconnectedness of all beings.
I want to especially thank the editorial team Jamie De Moya-cotter, Addison Nace, Diego Alegría, Andrea Guzmán, Anneli Aliaga and Avi Weinstein. To LACIS for its unconditional support of good ideas.
Note: In this edition we tried to be flexible when requiring a single form of citation (MLA, APA, Chicago), this allowed us to admit different disciplines and the use of their own formatting.
¹ In the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, which are non-linear constructions of networks that are rooted in culture.
² Like Freud, Lacan, Piaget, Klein, Bowlby, Laplanche among others.
³ Chul Han criticizes some things about globality such as consumerism and the loss of rituals.
About the Guest Editor
Professor Beatriz L. Botero has a PhD in Contemporary Hispanic American Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Psychoanalysis in which she received a Summa cum laude from the Department of Psychology at the Autonomous University of Madrid Spain. She specializes in Latin American novels, psychoanalysis and cultural studies. She is the author of Identidad Imaginada: Novelística Colombiana del Siglo XXI. (Pliegos Editores, 2020) and editor of Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels. Psychoanalysis and Gender Violence. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Botero’s research places special emphasis on identity, the body, and social conflict. Also has worked on these issues in relation to contemporary visual art.
Her last academic publication was “Latin American Violence Novels: Pain and the Gaze of Narrative.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis, edited by Vera J. Camden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021, pp. 128–144. Cambridge Companions to Literature.
She also published Botero, B. L. (2023) Linterna, Luz radical: desde el dolor, el alivio y el consuelo. 4W-WIT Antología Bilingüe. Editorial Ultramarina. Sevilla, España.
Beatriz is the winner of the 2023 CLASP Junior Faculty Teaching Award
For more information please visit Professor Beatriz L. Botero (blbotero.wixsite.com)
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