The complicity of a lateral gaze: From fantasies of the 'Orient' to an ethics of alterity in cross-cultural encounters (Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Jacques Lacan)

This dissertation takes a psychoanalytic approach to the ethical problem of the encounter with the Other that is usually addressed by philosophy. It's goal is to propose and articulate an ethics of alterity in the cross-cultural encounter that preserves difference as such, instead of exoticizing or annihilating it. To this end, my dissertation offers critical readings of literary and cultural productions ranging from cruise ship tourism and sex tourism, to travel literature, ethnography and biography. It includes theoretical discussions of Foucault, Said and Lacanian psychoanalysis with reference to poststructuralist, postcolonial and queer theories.; My dissertation presents sustained analyses of the sublime, the uncanny, the mirror stage, fetishism, hysteria and sexual difference, as well as introducing two critical tropes, complicity and the lateral gaze. Western fantasies of the exotic, oriental Other involve a colonization by transcendence that subsumes the alterity of the Other under a category of knowledge, leading to the aggrandizement of the barred Western subject at the expense of an objectified, racially Other subject. My reading of the psychoanalytic trope of the uncanny reveals the presence of a desiring Western fantasy working unconsciously to structure the cross-cultural encounter through a combination of narcissism and aggression in an attempt to prop up a Western identity split by the desire of the Other.; A proper ethics of alterity must account for that component of the Other irreducible to categories of knowledge or identification. In the Lacanian schema, this encounter with absolute difference takes place at the level of the real rather than the imaginary, and is ruled by drive rather than desire. To reconceptualize the cross-cultural encounter as a drive satisfaction, I introduce the trope of the lateral gaze to describe a state in which two subjects draw satisfaction from finding themselves caught up in an orbit around the jouissance of the real. I read the basis for intersubjective relations through the trope of complicity, which describes an intersubjective relationship that preserves difference as unknowable while it allows each subject agency and the freedom to be self-governing.