The Encounter with the Identical Other

Literary pieces featuring the double depict an encounter between the protagonist and another person, who is her identical other. Therefore they face various difficulties related to a threat cast on their unique identity, and this encounter challenges their process of self-definition. Martin Buber sees the existence of the other as essential for the occurrence of self-constitution within an individual. He maintains that any person needs another person to obtain confirmation of what she is and is born equipped with the ability to confirm her fellow-person in the same way (1959). However, as the other encountered by a doppelgänger protagonist is not truly “other”, the latter might confront a difficulty in the different stages of Buber’s self-constitution process. This paper seeks to shed light on the inter- and intra-personal relationships depicted in literary pieces focusing on the theme of the double, such as The Double (Dostoyevsky [1846] 1997; Saramago 2002), Despair (1965), and Too Much Nina (Orbach 2011), emphasizing the limitations cast by the encounter with the identical other on the protagonist’s self-constitution, as put forward by Buber

Aesthetics · Art · Constitution · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Self · Sociology · Computer Science · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Scientific Research and Philosophical Inquiry

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