Wherefore "The Other"?

As time goes on, I become painfully aware of just how ill read I am, and I'm cognizant that my ignorance especially extends to "postmodernist" works in philosophy - to which I must confess I have never been attracted. Whether as cause or consequence I cannot say for sure, but one of my pet peeves is what strikes me as a postmodernist verbal tic, "The Other."

Even at its best, philosophy tends to be jargon-laden, especially in translation. We encounter such terminological infelicities as thought-thinking-itself, what-it-means-to-be-such-and-such, that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-conceived, thing-in-itself, etc. Fair enough: when terms are not ready at-hand, one could do worse than - or can do no better than - resort to awkward coinages. However, my suspicion (prejudice, if you like) is that especially with the advent of the 20th century, one sees a burgeoning of "technical" grammata out of all proportion to their needfulness (cp. Heidegger). And so we are led down the via obscura.

It's difficult to fix a reliable starting point for nearly any trend of thought, but surely Hegel - for whom I have great esteem - is to blame for the general tendency, as well as the specific matter of "the Other." It's darkly humorous that shortly before undertaking the Phenomenology, he wrote to the great translator Voss, "... I should like to say of my aspirations that I shall try to teach philosophy to speak German. Once that is accomplished, it will be infinitely more difficult to give shallowness the appearance of profound speech."

At the beginning of the (in)famous section on "Lordship and Bondage," he writes, "Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self." (Phenomenology, 179 [emphasis in original])

Marx was no Marxist; and it's no virtue to imitate Hegel in his least edifying tendencies. Whence comes this fixation on "The Other" - what purchase does the formulation afford which cannot be had with more prosaic expressions? From Foucault to Frantz Fanon, Derrida to Edward Said to radical feminists, one meets this mystifying trope again and again. As best I can tell, more often than not it functions similarly to the popular usage of "homophobia" - as a pyschologistic strategy to undermine an opponent's discourse by imputing shameful motives. If it vaguely connotes something like "xeno-phobia" (etymologically speaking), and/or the all-too-human predilection to treat other persons as means and not ends, then why not just say so? My hunch is that a rather banal notion would remain were one to "deconstruct" the term.

Of course, I may be mistaken, and would be grateful for the remedy - any defenders of the needfulness of "The Other"?