'Encompassing' on the other hand seems to me to present a
different stance and project: to include differences, the
feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and ways of Others as part of
our own reality, as themselves being as 'down deep' as our
own. It might even imply the project of looking in ourselves
for those qualities of Others in which they seem most different
(and invariably most deficient, perverse, or repellant) from
us. It seems in fact quite likely that we are also Other,
paradoxically, for as we constitute the Us/Others differences,
dialectical logic guarantees that we contain our own
contradictories, which we project onto Others from ourselves
and what is feared, repressed, denied, disparaged in Us. There
is much to be learned from such a project.
As to encompassing how Others truly see us and themselves,
I have often wondered to what degree this is truly possible.
But we ought to try, we ought to listen, to hear not difference,
but something wholly Other, not defined by comparison or
relation to Us, outside our frames of reference, mostly
incomprehensible. There is work that might make us more than
we could otherwise be. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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