Who’s the Other? [a secret]

Abstract

A pedagogical experience is the event of the encounter between two bodies, two faces, two gazes, between which arises the possibility of a conversation without prejudices, because it’s not a matter of anticipating what should the other be, or how we should teach him, or which theories, methodologies or didactics should we deploy to ensure the process of learning. It’s about giving rise to the radical idea of the impossibility of knowing who the other is, neither before looking him face to face for the first time, nor after multiple encounters, the other will always be a secret, always far away from us. Despite this, there seems to be an obsession that leads us to ask ourselves "Who’s the other?" over and over again. It seems this question allow us to produce concepts, definitions, categorizations, diagnoses that are based, and at the same time produced, a language of sameness that supposes the existence of a false parameter of normality. But setting this question aside isn’t an easy task, because it’s not about making a new theory, or learning new euphemisms to name the other. The only way to transform our way of thinking is by having an encounter with the uncertainty that produces the presence of the other after we leave aside what we think we know about who the other is.