I know it's early, but I wanted to go ahead and post a few thoughts about Kristeva while they're fresh. They can be ignored (or not) as needed.
So this last half of Strangers to Ourselves definitely seems more historical than the first half of the book (or even than most of what we've read so far in this class). I found it very interesting that while Kristeva is attempting to give an account of attitudes towards foreigners in general, she moves from political to psychoanalytic attitudes towards foreignness. Her point in the chapter on the Enlightenment seems to be a marriage of these two qualities by which the "social domain" is not homogeneous but "a union of singularities" (132). She goes on to use similar language about "conflicting shams" (147) and "cosmopolitanism" (173) to call for a new acceptance of all humans as humans, in contrast to the traditional political positions that exclude non-citizens (as though foreigners were not human).
Finally she asks, "How could one tolerate a foreigner if one did not know one was a stranger to oneself?" (182). In some ways this wraps up her political section and launches her into a psychoanalytic discussion of Freud, for whom "that which is strangely uncanny would be that which was... familiar and, under certain conditions... emerges" (183). Kristeva uses Freud's theories to demonstrate her point that our individual, psychoanalytic understanding of ourselves must inform our political position toward foreigners: since we can't know ourselves, we must exist in a position of openness to others, who also can't know themselves.
I'm curious about the "manifesto" on pages 153-154 that calls for this understanding to inform political life by "a progressive and reasonable adjustment of the rights and duties of citizens with respect to non-citizens" (153) and for "an ethics, the fulfillment of which shall depend on education and psychoanalysis" (154). Is this a valid methodology for implementing her understanding of foreignness? In other words, would this work in the real world?
It's also interesting to me that our current attitudes toward others are so based on "trade among nations", as she points out (173). What do we think about the economic (capitalist?) manifestations of otherness? Is it positive that so much of our relationships with "others" depend on economics?
Thanks to Evelyn for starting this conversation. Evelyn writes above: "Kristeva uses Freud's theories to demonstrate her point that our individual, psychoanalytic understanding of ourselves must inform our political position toward foreigners: since we can't know ourselves, we must exist in a position of openness to others, who also can't know themselves." And then wonders if this would work "in the real world."
ReplyDeleteThis got me thinking about what it means that Kristeva uses history (an account of the past of the "real world?") to get us to this point. I'd just tweak Evelyn's question a little: how can "individual psychoanalytic understanding" converge on a ("political") analysis, that is, one that pertains to groups? And why, if this is the goal, go to history? What's at stake in her (very interesting and informative) account of the position of the foreigner in different times and places?
It might help to look at what she says about history on p. 104:
"Facing the problem of the foreigner, the discourses, difficulties, or even the deadlocks of our predecessors do not only make up a history; they constitute a cultural distance that is to be preserved and developed, a distance on the basis of which one might temper and modify the simplistic attitudes of rejection or indifference, as well as the arbitrary or utilitarian decisions that today regulate relationships between foreigners."
It seems to me that this "distance" provides for her a kind of analytical purchase on the question of otherness: so Paul's "cosmopolitanism" is different from the "cosmopolitanism" of the early Church, that of Dante, that of More, that of Rabelais, that of Montaigne, that of Paine, etc. etc. But amidst all those distinctions, it is at times difficult, as Scott remarked last week, to tell exactly where JK stands. Perhaps what's important here is not so much the variety of definitions (though it does seem that she likes some more than others) but the "discourses, difficulties, and deadlocks" that keep surfacing. Do we keep coming back around to the same problem? Are these deadlocks and difficulties the things that repeat, the things that might give us "distance" from which to view the present moment--and can this past of repeating deadlocks count in any way as a "Fugue" for the Foreigner?