Belief Held Through the Other

Belief Held Through the Other describes a way belief can persist by being attributed to another person, including an imagined one. The subject who claims merely to observe, criticize, or report what the Other believes may in fact be the one sustaining that belief indirectly. The concept makes belief less a matter of private conviction than of how conviction is assigned between people and circulated through public claims.

Belief Attributed to an Imagined Other

The book uses debates about Freudian phallic symbolism to show how an opponent can manufacture the believer whose beliefs they then reject. A forceful forward movement in a story may be labeled phallic penetration, or a tall building may be called a phallic symbol. Those making such readings do not straightforwardly identify themselves with the supposed doctrine: they either attribute belief in phallic symbols everywhere to a mythical orthodox Freudian or endorse the interpretation only in order to criticize it. The figure of the orthodox Freudian, the book argues, is itself a fiction produced by the critic.

That fiction serves as a subject supposed to believe: someone else is made to carry the belief, leaving its actual proponent at a distance from it. In this case, the critic who projects belief onto the imagined Freudian is the one who believes through the Other. The mechanism is not simply that a person falsely reports another's opinion; the attribution provides a way for the belief to operate without being fully owned by the person who advances it.

Public Confidence and Privatization

A newspaper column opposing George Bush's plans to privatize Social Security gives the structure a political and economic form. Its argument is that privatization depends on Americans accepting the proposition that stocks are better than bonds, even though that proposition can remain true only while many people believe it false. The White House, meanwhile, is campaigning to persuade everyone that the proposition is true. If that campaign succeeds, the condition on which the proposition supposedly depends disappears and the theory fails.

The example turns collective belief into part of the claim's precarious truth-condition: persuasion does not merely spread the theory but risks undoing it. It also sharpens the concept's central tension. What appears to be a stable belief can depend on others not believing it, while public advocacy attempts to convert that concealed dependence into general conviction. The social distribution of belief is therefore not incidental to the argument; it is what makes the argument hold, and what threatens to make it collapse.