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one Thus Spake the Gastarbeiter Sten Nadolny’s Selim oder die Gabe der Rede I was always able to speak, when I spoke about Selim. While writing it turned out: he was a phantom. I had conceived of him more than I had understood him. That does not disturb me. The fallacy was probably better than the reality. Who should read it? Selim! Selim should read it. sten nadolny, selim In his volume Of Hospitality, Jacques Derrida contemplates the“Foreigner Question.” At the very outset, he asks if “the question of the foreigner” is not indeed “a foreigner’s question? Coming from the foreigner, from Abroad?”(3). He shifts the accent of his interrogation:“the question of the foreigner” becomes for Derrida “a question of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner” (ibid. 3). While registering the presence of foreigners in Plato’s Sophist,Derrida reminds us that it is the foreigner,indeed,who asks the first question (ibid. 5). The arrival of the foreigner signals the birth of the question. “The Foreigner carries and puts the fearful question,” Derrida asserts, “he sees or foresees himself” (ibid. 11). As he moves from the Sophist to the Statesmen to The Apology of Socrates, Derrida elaborates upon Socrates’ enactment of a foreigner in front of the Athenians: “a foreigner accused in a language he says he does not speak, a defendant required to justify himself, in the language of the other”(ibid. 17). Derrida underlines the notion of “the foreigner (hostis) welcomed as a guest or as enemy” (ibid. 45). The question of the foreigner is thus established as the question of hospitality and hostility, of acceptance and accusation, of judgments and justifications. Derrida complicates the distinction between guests and hosts, arguing that the question of the foreigner as a foreigner’s question emerges from the interstices of equations of guest and host, enemy and friend. In the naming of the foreigner, calling him or her ★   xenos, hostis, or l’étranger, the polis defines itself, and the foreigner defines the polis by way of presenting his question. The foreigner acknowledges the assignment of being a foreigner simultaneous to offering the polis a predicament of willingness to engage with the foreigner. The foreigner is willing to defend himself in a language that is not his own, as the interpretative polarities of guest, host, enemy, and friend seek signification through enunciation. The foreigner empowers himself through enunciation and interrogation in the language of the polis where he is a guest. Derrida’s reflections on the fragile relationship between the citizen and the foreigner mark two distinct possibilities, one more obvious than the other. The bidirectionality of the question, the necessary exchange between the host and the guest, provides political credence to the foreigner: the foreigner might not initially be perceived as a juridical or epistemological equal of the host, and yet he emerges as a subject of the polity. In addition, the foreigner presses the question of his epistemological and juridical equivalence by enunciating his question in the language of the host; the guest transforms his culpability as a foreigner into a capability. Derrida’s reflections unsettle the ontological stability that might be accrued to the foreigner—for there isn’t a clear trajectory one can follow from an inferiorized, disempowered status of the foreigner to an empowered emergence of the foreigner as a subject of the polity. The possibilities that I list above remain as such; the questions of the foreigner are not necessarily answered. The enactment of foreignness by speaking the language of the host does not instantly provide clues to his acceptance. The foreigner emerges neither as a captive of his foreignness nor as an entirely emancipated and, therefore, equitable subject of the polity. I inaugurate my discussion of representation of a Turkish guest worker in a German novel with Derrida’s“Foreigner Question,”not to reenact the long march from captivity to emancipation, from disempowerment to empowerment of a foreigner through a narrative. Derrida’s reflections underline issues of acceptance and accusation, judgments and justifications , epistemological and juridical inequities, culpability and capability, and most importantly, silence and enunciation that infiltrate and accompany invocations and associations of the very word Gastarbeiter—a guest, whose primal familiarity to the German nation is through the justification of his existence as a laborer, but whose familiarity as a guest is at once belabored by foreignness, Fremdheit. The guest must labor to learn the language of...

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