The other is at its base a social experience as distinct from a pure intersubjectivity or existential encounter. Accepting the latter as basic would make paradigms of the type of master-slave or hostage or mimetic double, fundamental, and social relations the derived kinds of implicit and strategically ambiguous treaties needed to deal with such threatening imbalances. Isn't it simpler to take the various kinds of social situations as prior to the plays that emerge from them? What you identify first of all is the context of relations that you will have around some other, which then rapidly gains specificity as events take you down the tree of possibilities. There are places you have already visited and there are places you have only imagined, and ones you had never imagined but are forced to admit the existence of, since they are staring you in the face. The personifying logic of dreams is exactly the familiar world as seen side-on. For example there is no other without an immediately grasped gender onto which various posterior games will be grafted including, if necessary, a contract to act as if the genders were reversed. If you admit that the social interpellates you, in the voice of a quasi-other, then this voice cannot be neutral, it is either masculine or feminine, loud or soft, knowing or oblivious - and every alternative makes a difference. You don't get close to someone you get close to a clan or a clique or a club. And it isn't just you, its all the crowd you carry along with you.