Другото

This text is an introduction to the next articles and offers their basis and their context. The author tries to define the key notions Identity, Other, and their variations. He also puts them in their Bulgarian context and presents two projects that stay behind them.

The author sets out his own typology of communing with the Other, derived from some current theories in the humantities and the disputes they give rise to. It is based on the concept of mimesis, emancipated from the requirement for verisimilitude. Four variants are delineated of the mimetic stance in communing with the Other, viz., sensualistic, dialogic, technological and catastrophic. They are illustrated with examples from literature and anthropological research; their time sequence is also inquired into.

The article focuses on hesitation as an anthropological mode, as a psychological state taken in its everyday pragmatic understanding. Usually hesitation is seen as a 'battle of motives' on the stage of consciousness with a hindrance in decision making in gen eral or in case of complicated problematic situation According to the main thesis of the text hesitation is paradoxically engendered not only by 'selective deficiency', not only by the difficulty of choice but also by reluctance to make it. Namely, hesitation displays not only its deterministic but also, so to speak, its 'wave' logic according to ehich it is marked by the intention of the self not to loose the alternatives, to keep the 'packet' of coexisting possibilities open.