The Logic of Non-Oppositional Selfhood: How to Remain Free from Dichotomies While Still Using Them

Abstract In recent years, increasing philosophical attention has been given to an approach that does not begin with self and other as separated individuals, but rather takes relationality as the starting point for thinking about self and other. However, this shift in thinking is not as straightforward as it might initially appear. Various pitfalls lie hidden in the attempt to conceptualize the self and other relationally. Without carefully identifying and relativizing these pitfalls, theories of relational selfhood may easily fall into another form of extremity, distinct from the substantialization of the individual. This article examines several characteristic modes of argument employed by philosophers who explore relational selfhood and alterity. Particular attention is given to the rhetorical use of the expression neither–nor as a strategy for rejecting both poles of a binary opposition and for dislocating fixed dichotomies. I then consider how such a dismantling of oppositional schemas can function as a procedure for exposing lived experiences obscured by those very schemas. Finally, I argue that the task is not to erase such oppositional structures entirely, but rather to stand within the very site of their generation – still utilizing them, while at the same time becoming free from them.