Intersecting heterologies

The author proposes that it has largely been underestimated that the therapeutic community is placed within two discourses – that of therapy and that of community – and has almost exclusively focused on the first. In so doing, it has been restricted within a medical or pseudo-medical conceptual framework. In an appeal to re-frame the discussion about the therapeutic community in relation to its forgotten discourse reference is principally made to the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and to two of his sources – Heidegger and Socrates – and more specifically to Lacan’s notion of lack which is contrasted to modernity’s trope of expectation which corresponds to the Imaginary phallus.     

The Heterological Quest: Michel de Certeau's Travel Narratives and the "Other" of Comparative Religious Ethics

One of the central methodological issues for contemporary practitioners of comparative ethics is how to conceptualize and relate to the "other" encountered in cross-cultural studies. A valuable resource for reflection on this problem is the work of the French historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, whose diverse opus coheres around his notion of heterology—a "science of the other." In this article I explore perspectives on the cultural "other" emerging from Certeau's analyses of a series of "travel narratives" documenting the European encounter with the peoples of the New World. Certeau's meditations on the metaphor of the voyage, the interplay of orality and literacy, the politics of ethnography, and the semiotics of the "return of the repressed" offer, I suggest, important insights for comparative ethicists.