Rather, these meetings or parties turn out to be nothing more than a satisfaction of conscience on the part of the host (because she has invited/accepted/admitted an Other into her home or circle of acquaintance) and a fleeting satisfaction of desire for connection on the part of the foreigner (11). Kristeva's account here seems to be linked up with the notion we have discussed in class about liberal self-righteousness - assuaging our consciences by, for example, watching a documentary about oppressed workers rather than some more effective action.
So, and here's where this particular section becomes problematic for me, the hospitality here (at least of an insincere or conscience-soothing variety) seems to fail as a form of neighbor love because it requires no commitment to the foreigner on the part of the host. But, at least to me, hospitality would seem like an example of neighbor-love in practice, the opening of one's home to stranger(s) as a sign of trust, an action that enables the opportunity for a connection with the other or at least an opportunity for the mutual recognition of otherness. (I should also point out that I acknowledge that this question of hospitality may also be problematic because such a personal relation does not first encounter the faceless Third and so may be reliant on a sense of empathy rather than affect-less love - but in the interest of finding some practical action that might fall into category of neighbor-love, I wanted to pursue this thought.)
Yet, here, hospitality fails because it is the mere show of encountering the neighbor with the thought always in mind (it would seem on the part of the host) that it is a temporary encounter, one that involve no deeper commitment than allowing the foreigner into the home briefly.
This raises for me the question: how deep must or should our commitment to the foreigner (or neighbor) be in order to fulfill the command to love the neighbor? To return to a question that was raised earlier in the semester: is it even possible to love the neighbor beyond the level of surfaces or beyond the level of an empty universal declaration of love?
At this point, I'm not sure to where all of these musings tend, but it was helpful for me to begin to ponder through why this particular potential enactment of neighbor-love seems to fail in this account, in hopes of eventually reaching a better sense of what neighbor-love might look like in action.
I found Beth's post nicely evocative of a dilemma we have yet to resolve: (to slightly paraphrase) what might neighbor-love look like in action? It's probably fair to say that it's a little frustrating to have *finished* the R/S/Z book (itself an achievement!) without a clear example of neighbor-love around which we might orient our thinking. We do, as Beth nicely points out here, have a lot of examples of what it is NOT: liberal compassion, and in Kristeva, it is not simple hospitality to the stranger. But not yet a clear example of what it is.
ReplyDeleteSo, what does neighbor-love look like in positive terms, and in action? What Kristeva asserts, as Beth points out too, is the importance of "those foreigners we all recognize ourselves to be." This "we all" acting--recognizing--seems crucial here.
This made me think about something I noticed this time in reading Kristeva's style in writing (writing is, after all, also an action, something that has practical effects in the world). Check out the top paragraph on p. 15. Here, K shifts her address, from the third person ("one") to the second person ("you"). This is sort of what she's doing in that sentence that Beth quotes, too. From "foreigners" to "we all." Up until the top of p. 15, K's has mostly described the "foreigner" by way of the third person, "the foreigner," or the "one". But by the end of the 3rd sentence--and throughout the rest of this paragraph and regularly throughout the chapter--she addresses us, as readers directly: "you," "you," "you." The next paragraph starts: "Your realm is silence." Who is this "you"? The foreigner? me? you? you-me-in the part of ourselves that is the foreigner?
So 2 questions: 1) Does this style of writing help clarify her point about "foreignness" and "we all"?
And 2) Does her writing here count as acting in the world? It's evocative, not declarative (a big difference from R/S/Z who do a lot of declaring), though K. declares a fair bit, too, I suppose. Would it be fair, for example, to call Kristeva's style of writing one way she encodes "neighbor-love"? And could her way of writing, to any degree, "count" as en-acting 'neighbor-love'?
Very interested to hear what you all think.
I am not sure if I can explain this pronoun whiplash entirely, but I wonder if it is a consequence of Kristeva’s insistence on motion in our encounter with the otherness of the foreigner. After cautioning us against objectifying her or his otherness, she tells us to “merely touch it, brush by it, without giving it a permanent structure” (Kristeva 3). Later in her discussion of the master-slave dialectic, it is the mobility enabled by globalization that makes us all foreigners, and this realization of our own foreignness causes us to momentarily identify with the other. Unfortunately the resulting impulse causes a solidification of the “we” against the foreigner who must be kept in “‘his’ place” (Kristeva 20). Perhaps I’m simplifying things, but it seems to me that, for Kristeva, the first step toward neighbor-love can be found in this gesture toward mobility, the opposite of the solidifying experience of the foreigner as invader by the “entrenched” native (20). While I cannot offer a positive example of neighbor-love, in order to be open to the possibility of it, I think we must embrace this motion, “a wind that jostles and ruffles but bears us toward our own unknown and who knows what future” (Kristeva 19-20). By moving back and forth between the “one” and “you,” Kristeva performs the sort of encounter with the foreigner that she encourages in the reader.
ReplyDeleteEmilie - I think your observation of Kristeva's insistence on motion is astute. One of the challenges her work presents (for me anyway) is discerning, especially once she becomes more historical after the first chapter, what examples she is holding up as positive and which are negative. (Or, I suppose, whether we are supposed to understand them as such, rather than as part of a narrative whole that will build to the end of the book.) But one of the most profound notions I marked in my reading was her definition of "oikeiosis" as individualism enlightened by reason, where "the distinction of the other is immediately outweighed by the apology of the self within an ethics that caught a glimpse of the otherness only to deny it" (59).
ReplyDeleteA "glimpse" has some of the same connotations of a "brush," a "jostle," or a "ruffle." I think our earlier readings might demand that this otherness not be denied as in Kristeva's definition of oikeiosis, but rather confronted and, ultimately, accepted with all of the implications thereof. Yet, in a sense, these words of motion and fleetingness suggest the possibility of contact with and acknowledgement of the particularities/exceptions that constitute the part of the Other that is unknowable, but without denying them, on the one hand (Enlightenment universalism), or dwelling on them, on the other (contemporary liberal multiculturalism).
I've found this particular discussion of motion and the fleetingness of the encounter with the other really helpful because it was something that I was trying to think through as I was reading this section of Kristeva. And while I think what has been said here is correct according to Kristeva's formulation of our encounters, it also seems important to point out the repetition that she pictures as necessary to confronting the other. While we only encounter the other briefly - "merely touch it, brush by it, without giving it a permanent structure" (3) - (as Emilie rightly pointed out), it is not a "one and done" sort of affair. We must partake in a "harmonious repetition of the differences" that are brought out through the "otherness of the foreigner" (3). Difference here - and the fear or anxiety that arises through encountering it - must continuously be examined; acknowledging it once, Kristeva seems to say, even if we do not try to stamp it out, is insufficient to do justice to the foreigner.
ReplyDeleteSo, trying to jump in on the discussion here, I had a couple of thoughts. First, about hospitality as an act of neighbor-love: I'm wondering if we actually *do* encounter the faceless Third as we invite the foreigner/stranger into our home. There's a sacrifice implicit here (of time, money, privacy, food, etc.) in being willing to take a completely unknown quantity into our personal space, to become vulnerable to that. I think the idea from Zizek (was it?) about being vulnerable in the face of the Other--I can't know him; he can't know me; I can't know myself--is helpful here. While experiencing the giving of hospitality to a foreigner, you are immediately confronted with the fact that that person doesn't know you, and you don't know them--a fact that leads to awkward conversations, pauses in the dialogue, the uncertain shuffling of feet or chairs around the table. So the strangeness of the foreigner (in my understanding) highlights for the host his/her own strangeness, and leads to that "humility" or sacrifice.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the deeper commitment we want here isn't so much a commitment to one particular foreigner as to foreigners in general--a constant opening of the home space to the unknown?
I actually really liked Kristeva's style. I think it does count as an act of neighbor-love, as acting in the world. The waffling between pronouns reminds the reader that he/she is a foreigner, too, and therefore can't be distanced from the discussion. (I found myself sympathizing in a weird, intense way with what Kristeva was saying.) Her style enacts the fact that us as readers and "the foreigner" may/may not actually be the same person.
I wonder, though, if she's pulling us as readers into her identification of the foreigner, are there ways in which she as author identifies with the foreigner, too? Does the declarative style she uses later on distance her from the foreigner by analyzing from outside? Or does her intimate knowledge of historical attitudes toward foreignness actually suggest that she perhaps may know these customs "from the inside"--as a foreigner herself?
I find it very unfortunate that R/S/Z's book doesn't give any examples of neighbor love (as mentioned above) but seems to content itself with a negative (political) theology of it. I'm not convinced the question of what, specifically, would count as neighbor love for R/S/Z has an answer.
ReplyDeleteKristeva, however, locates biblical answers: "Because they met you not with bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt; and because they hired against thee Balaam the son of Beor of Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse thee" (Deut. 23:4). So we have two breaches of neighbor love. I'm more concerned with the first. The passage implies that the opposite behavior, the offering of bread and water, would have been an act of neighbor love. I think for Kristeva, and certainly for Yaweh, this one off, non-committal intervention would count. This is maddeningly simple and must be, at the least, less violent on the Moabite's part toward the Hebrews than doing nothing or (worst case scenario) making some more grand or sustained intervention (thus obstructing the Hebrew's journey) in order for the Moabites to appease themselves by encountering the other (small other) in another mode.
I found myself returning to the same ideas and questions that Beth W. noted in her last post. The idea of the fleeting nature of the encounter with the foreigner is something that seems to run not only through Kristeva's text, but also through much of the R/S/Z essays. In particular, it seems that Kristeva's idea of only experiencing brief encounters with the foreigner is in line with Santner's discussion of "flashes." (Santner, right? The neighbor theories are getting a little jumbled in my brain this morning...) As Beth mentioned, Kristeva seems to suggest that it is our task to *re*encounter the foreigner - over and over - in order to "do justice" to him... Would it be out of line, then, to assert that this act of seeking out or re-encountering the foreigner is in itself an act of neighbor love?
ReplyDeleteSomething else that really captured my attention in these first few chapters of Kristeva were the ideas of excess and abundance that kept coming up in relation to the foreigner. For example, on page 4, she says "The foreigner's appearance signals that he is 'in addition.'" Almost in the same breath, though, she speaks of the lack of the foreigner - lacking in selfhood, suffering a sort of placelessness, etc. Both of these things, I think, are linked to liminality (and transience), which also seems to play an important role for Kristeva. Abundance, lack, liminal positioning... All of these things function to destabilize the position of the foreigner. It seems that this destabilization might open up a space for our encounters with the foreigner. It is "on the edges," so to speak, that our "flashes" with the foreigner (and our nighbor love) might occur... Just a thought.
One final note: Evelyn, I think your question regarding Kristeva's positioning (is she a foreigner herself?) is a really interesting one. In the opening lines of Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva notes, "The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities." Perhaps her shifting pronoun use is indeed a way for us (the reader? the non-foreigner? the foreigner?) is intended as a means for us to approach our dual-positioning as both foreigner and not-foreigner? This all goes back to an idea I raised (albeit not particularly clearly articulated) about the role of the Neighbor/foreigner in our conception of ourselves... As Kristeva seems to make suggest in the opening lines to this book, we become conscious of ourselves (and our difference) when we are put into contact with the foreigner...
An amendment.
ReplyDeleteLet's say that S/R/Z want to trouble what I read as a rather simplistic, but no less helpful, neighbor love in Kristeva. Perhaps material support (bread, water) would serve to perpetuate violence, by, perhaps, a wish on the Moabite's part to put in debt the Hebrews, or their God, or maybe just as a thumb in the eye of Egypt: a willing perpetuation of violence, a confirmation of otherness, strangeness.
Could we then consider this an act of neighbor love?
Well, it is still an act TOWARD neighbor love. I don't know where this quote comes from, except obviously from the mouth of a Nazi, "First we killed the Jews because we hated them; then we hated the Jews because we killed them." Hate begat hate. So can love (even non psychoanalytically satisfying love, but simple beneficence, even with ulterior motives) beget love. If not neighbor love itself, this imagined intervention of the Moabites must be at least a move TOWARD neighbor love, and thus contain a kernel of neighbor love, if inchoate.