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109 c h a p t e r 7 The Foreign, the Uncanny, and the Foreigner: Concepts of the Self and the Other in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Philosophy Rudi Visker Although the first and the last word in my title differ by only one syllable, it is this, at first sight, negligible difference that will be at the center of this paper’s attempt to question one of the few themes on which today’s humanities seem, by and large, in agreement: the idea that there is a link between the theme of the foreign (the strange, the other small “o”) and that of the foreigner (the stranger, the Other capital “o”). This link seems to be so evident that it is hardly ever articulated—it is, more often implicitly than explicitly, itself linked with a number of assumptions concerning the role that psychoanalysis could play in a “progressive” contemporary philosophy . One of these assumptions is that, if one follows psychoanalysis in introducing the other into the self, the relation between such a self and the Other (the foreigner, the stranger) will become less tense. This belief in the possible results of combining psychoanalysis and a philosophical valuation of the Other is exemplarily formulated by Julia Kristeva, an author with a well-established reputation both in philosophical and in analytical circles, in a short passage from which I will start off my analysis. However, before doing so, I should first like to stress again its exemplarity. Its authorship is in a sense of secondary importance; what matters is that a certain author, named Kristeva, and regardless of what she may have said elsewhere , gives voice in this passage to an énoncé, a discursive statement that isn’t 110 The Foreign, the Uncanny, and the Foreigner characteristically hers, but that points to the “archive” or the “order of discourse ” from out of which we all, to a certain extent, speak.1 It is not the fact that it is Kristeva who writes this that interests me, but that what she writes is something we all seem to underwrite, to the point of no longer even taking note of what it is in fact that we are in agreement with. Our disagreements in the humanities presuppose that first agreement that is not an agreement with or against a particular author, but rather something like an episteme, a discursive soil, a horizon that is operative in and presupposed by all the ongoing discussions that are made possible by it. Indeed, as Foucault has shown, in The Order of Things, for example, the tendency to focus on authors, on their auctorial mastery over their works, and hence the increasing parochialism and the partisanship that characterizes so much of the secondary literature,2 shares with the history of ideas a common blindness: It focuses on what Foucault calls the “tines of a fork,” and neglects that they have a common stem that is stuck in a discursive soil from the perspective of which the passionate discussions between the tines are no more than “storms in a children’s paddling pool.”3 Having said this, I hope the reader will for now be willing to bracket Kristeva’s name and reputation and simply read the following passages taken from the end of her extremely popular Strangers to Ourselves in which she combines what I take to be a philosophical and a psychoanalytical argument to reach the following cosmopolitan conclusion: On the basis of an erotic, death-bearing unconscious, the uncanny strangeness . . . sets the difference within us in its most bewildering shape and presents it as the ultimate condition of our being with others. . . . By recognizing our uncanny strangeness, we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreign is within me, hence we are all foreigners.4 Hence, her conclusion that “the ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics : It would involve a cosmopolitanism of a new sort that, cutting across governments, economies, and markets, might work for a mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious—desiring, destructive, fearful, empty, impossible.”5 To summarize: if we recognize the foreign in us, we will no longer have a problem with foreigners. As I stated before, I think that the conclusion to which Kristeva jumps in this passage is not warranted by what she has shown. But before coming to that, let me first show how the kind of reasoning to which we are invited here profits from the philosophical...

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