The Other is omnipresent: all our lives we will play with, struggle against, and learn to use its manifestations. Verbal jokes are directed at the Other—they seek to subvert the Other by slyly playing with the boundaries of obscenity, social acceptability, or with the rules of language itself [e.g. puns]. A person who bumps against a piece of furniture and automatically says, 'sorry' is addressing the Other; a person who is habitually late may be rebelling against the Other in its guise as Time; the Other is in money: the miser and the gambler are both trying to bend it to their will. But in psychoanalysis, it is the Other as language that is the most important, because of the structuring effect that language has upon the development of the Subject, and because the truth of the Subject can only be apprehended by means of it.
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Source: Lionel Bailly, Lacan (Oxford, England: Oneworld Publications, 2009), 73.
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