Ewa Ziarek

Department of English
University of Notre Dame
Krzysztof.Ziarek.2@nd.edu

 

Once again, politics must be conceived as a relationship of strangers who do not understand one another in a subjective and immediate sense, relating across time and distance.

 

–Iris Marion Young

 

A paradoxical community is emerging, made up of foreigners who are reconciled with themselves to the extent they recognize themselves as foreigners.

 

–Julia Kristeva

 

Nancy Fraser’s influential critique of Kristeva points to the central difficulty in Kristeva’s theory and to a strange paradox in its reception.¹ Within the space of the same essay, Fraser reads Kristeva’s work as both a traditional psychoanalytic elaboration of subjectivity–and therefore irrelevant for social theory–and as a devastating critique of social relations–to which social theory has to respond. On the one hand, she argues that Kristeva’s work “focuses almost exclusively on intrasubjective tensions and thereby surrenders its ability to understand intersubjective phenomena, including affiliation . . . and struggle”; on the other hand, she claims that Kristeva’s thought “is defined in terms of the shattering of social identity, and so it cannot figure in the reconstruction of the new, politically constituted, collective identities and solidarities that are essential to feminist politics.”² Fraser’s essay addresses two important questions to Kristeva in particular, and to psychoanalysis in general. First, it asks about the relation between the psychic and the social, between the decentered self and the “shattered social identity.” Second, it inquires whether group formations and social affiliations are conceivable without a reference to collective identities.³

 

In Kristeva’s 1989 Etrangers à nous-mêmes, translated into English as Strangers to Ourselves, this difficult intersection between the split psychic space and the fractured social identity leads to a rethinking of the possible ways of being in common in the wake of the crisis of the religious and national communities. In this text, Kristeva focuses on the status of the foreigner/stranger in the context of the historical and political conceptions of social identities, in particular, in the context of the Enlightenment’s dissolution of religious ties and the subsequent emergence of the modern nation-state: “With the establishment of nation-states we come to the only modern . . . definition of foreignness: the foreigner is the one who does not belong to the state in which we are, the one who does not have the same nationality.”⁴ Kristeva argues, however, that this “legal” definition merely covers over the deeper symptom provoked by the appearance of the foreigner: “the prickly passions aroused by the intrusion of the other in the homogeneity of . . . a group” (ST, 41). The foreigner provides the best exemplification of the “political” logic of the nation-state and its most vertiginous aberration–the logic that founds and con-founds the distinctions of man and citizen, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, civil and political rights, and finally, law and affect: “The difficulty engendered by the matter of foreigners would be completely contained in the deadlock caused by the distinction that sets the citizen apart from man . . . The process means . . . that one can be more or less a man to the extent that one is more or less a citizen, that he who is not a citizen is not fully a man. Between the man and a citizen there is a scar: the foreigner” (ST, 97-98). Seen as the aporia of the Enlightenment and, especially, as the impasse of its political rationality, the figure of the scar both enables and prevents a clear separation between myth and reason, the archaic and the modern, affect and law, same and other. Fracturing the imagined unity of the national body, the figure of the foreigner–a supplementary double of the Enlightenment’s political rationality–anticipates the Freudian “logic” of the uncanny.

 

Kristeva’s strategy to rethink social affiliations at work in modern nation-states from the marginal and ambivalent position of the foreigner parallels the project of Homi K. Bhabha to interpret the narrative of the nation from “the perspective of the nation’s margin and the migrants’ exile.”⁵ Not surprisingly, both Kristeva and Bhabha turn to Freud’s discussion of the uncanny in order to underscore not only the duplicity and ambivalence of the margin but also the threat it poses to the homogeneity of the national identity. This emphasis on the liminality fissuring the unity of the nation from within serves as a corrective to the accounts of nationality, which presuppose the imaginary unity of the people or “the sociological solidity of the national narrative” (DN, 305). While rightly criticizing Kristeva’s too hasty embrace of the pleasures of exile, Bhabha at the same time credits her for “a powerful critique and redefinition of the nation as a space for the emergence of feminist political and psychic identifications” (DN, 303).

 

Bhabha refers here to Kristeva’s analysis of the double temporality undercutting the continuity of the national historical narrative in “Women’s Time.” In Strangers to Ourselves Kristeva not only focuses far more explicitly on “the critique and redefinition” of the national space, but intertwines this political diagnosis of the aporia in the logic of nationalism with an inquiry into the possibilities of an ethics of psychoanalysis–an issue only briefly broached in “Women’s Time.” In the context of ethics, the foreigner becomes the figure of otherness as such–otherness inhabiting both the inter and the intra-subjective relations: “in that sense, the foreigner is a ‘symptom’ . . . : psychologically he signifies the difficulty we have of living as an other and with others; politically, he underscores the limits of nation-states and of the national political conscience” (ST, 103). Posited in this double way, the figure of the foreigner in Kristeva’s argument opens a space where politics is entwined with ethics. As Kristeva insists, “the ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics,” because both are fundamentally concerned with the critique of violence and with the elaboration of different ways of being with others. Not dependent upon violent expulsion or “peaceful” absorption of others into a common social body, psychoanalysis, Kristeva argues, “sets the difference within us in its most bewildering shape and presents it as the ultimate condition of our being with others” (ST, 192). In this essay I would like to ask what notion of alterity is implied by the intersection, or perhaps, a disjunction, between politics and ethics.

 

Kristeva finishes her Strangers to Ourselves with a reading of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, arguing that the Freudian essay might implicitly create a discursive space for a different concept of sociality divorced from the violence of xenophobia underlying national affiliations. As has been frequently pointed out, the Freudian uncanny belongs to the specific historical formation of the Enlightenment, emerging as the obverse side of the modern subject and its scientific, secular rationality.⁶ Kristeva supplements this discussion by arguing that the uncanny has to be understood as the counterpart of yet another legacy of the Enlightenment–the disintegration of religious communities and subsequent formation of the modern nation-states.⁷ This discursive location of the critique of nationalism and its forms of social affiliations is at the same time the most valuable and the most problematic aspect of Kristeva’s analysis because it brings into sharp focus the uneasy relationship between the disintegration of the psychic space and the transformation of the social space. It might be worth recalling that despite more and more frequent references to the uncanny in the political context (as, for instance, in Bhabha’s case, the uncanny underscores the ambivalence and liminality of the national space), Kristeva’s choice of this particular essay is rather odd in the context of psychoanalysis: as far as the psychoanalytical interpretation of the social formation is concerned, Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Civilization and its Discontents, or Moses and Monotheism, for instance, would be more logical, and seemingly more rewarding, texts. Although Kristeva is first to admit the absence of explicit political concerns–“strangely enough, there is no mention of foreigners in the Unheimliche” (ST, 191)–she argues that it is precisely this silence that is strange, itself uncanny: “Are we nevertheless so sure that the ‘political’ feelings of xenophobia do not include, often unconsciously, that agony of frightened joyfulness that has been called unheimlich . . . ?” (ST, 191).

 

On the basis of the explicit parallel between the political feelings of xenophobia and the affect of the uncanny, Kristeva argues that the condition of non-violent being with others lies in the renunciation of the imaginary subjective unity and in the subsequent acceptance of alterity within the self:

 

Delicately, analytically, Freud does not speak of foreigners: he teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves. That is perhaps the only way not to hound it outside of us. (ST, 192)

 

No matter how ethically admirable, Kristeva’s thesis is bound to disappoint as an answer to the political violence of nationalism and xenophobia. The idea of welcoming others to our own uncanny strangeness not only appears individualistic, it also risks psychologizing or aestheticizing the problem of political violence, not to mention the fact that the focus on the uncanny might obfuscate specific historical and political genealogy of nationalism and the memory of its victims–issues Kristeva herself raises only briefly in the historical part of her analysis. We seem to be confronted here with a dangerous reduction of the political crisis to a psychologism of sorts–to an unchangeable psychological trait, like, for instance, the subjective fear of one’s internal otherness. Written in non-technical and sometimes personal style, the whole project might even strike us as banal. It might appear so at first, especially when Kristeva’s thesis is left unqualified or extracted from the overall argument of the text. The question with which we are confronted here is whether the crisis in the social relations, and especially the crisis of nationality, can be explained (and perhaps redressed) by the analysis of the disintegration of the psychic space.

 

Needless to say, Kristeva inherits this difficulty from Freud. Contrary to her claim that Freud does not speak about foreigners in “The ‘Uncanny’,” there are of course numerous political references to foreigners in the Freudian text: from the strangers destroying the heimlich character of one’s country to the protestant rulers who “do not feel . . . heimlich among their catholic subjects”; from the conspirators and revolutionaries whispering the “watchword of freedom,” to those who are “deceitful and malicious toward cruel masters.” It would be rather difficult to imagine more explicitly “political” examples of social unrest. All of them suggest a crisis of national affiliation, a subversion of political authority, and an erosion of communicability as a consequence of this subversion. If we recall that religion and the army are Freud’s privileged instances of the libidinal group organization, then these “political” examples of the uncanny are not merely casual references but in fact paradigmatic cases of a disintegrated community. The problem remains, however, because these political examples are not intended to illustrate the social crisis but to exemplify the subjective affect–the dread evoked by castration anxiety, repetition-compulsion, or the uncanny doubling. Nonetheless, there remains something excessive about the sheer multiplications of these political instances–and this excess of the political leads us to the difficult question whether this subjective anxiety can figure as a possible transformation of the social.

 

For Kristeva, this excess of the political in “The ‘Uncanny'” is a subtle reminder of the difficult circumstances of Freud’s life, in particular, of his experience of anti-Semitism: “Freud’s personal life, a Jew wandering from Galicia to Vienna and London, with stopovers in Paris, Rome, and New York (to mention only a few of the key stages of his encounters with political and cultural foreignness), conditions his concern to face the other’s discontent as ill-ease in the continuous presence of the ‘other scene’ within us” (ST, 181). However, Kristeva locates “The ‘Uncanny'” not only in Freud’s historical context but also in her own. Strangers to Ourselves, and especially, Nations without Nationalism (a text which includes an open letter to Harlem Dèsir, a founder of SOS Racisme) is meant to speak to the contemporary crisis of national identity in Europe generated by the opposite tendencies of economic consolidation and ethnic particularisms: on the one hand, the growing economic integration of the European community; on the other hand, the disintegration of the Soviet Block and the subsequent rise of nationalism and ethnic violence in Eastern Europe, the rise of anti-Semitism, the unification of Germany, the increasing violence against immigrants (especially non-European immigrants), and finally, the rise of French chauvinism in response to the crisis of French national identity.⁸ In this context, one should also mention the ambiguity of Kristeva’s position as a Bulgarian living in France and attempting to speak as a cosmopolitan intellectual (as she admits, tongue in cheek, “I am willing to grant the legitimacy of the ironic objection you might raise: it is beneficial to be a cosmopolitan when one comes from a small country such as Bulgaria”⁹).

 

Despite the pressure of these immediate political concerns, however, Kristeva’s reading of Freud still suggests a certain displacement of politics–the politics of psychoanalysis does not emerge from an explicit discussion of the political. The specific character of this displacement becomes apparent if we recall that Kristeva attempts to articulate the politics of psychoanalysis by reading an essay that is preoccupied, perhaps more explicitly than other Freud’s texts, with aesthetics. Aware of the difficulties that this uneasy relation between politics and aesthetics creates, especially in the aftermath of modernist aestheticism, Kristeva situates Freud’s and her own work at the crossroads of modernity described by Walter Benjamin: between the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics.¹⁰ The implication of her argument is that aesthetics cannot secure its autonomy, that it is perpetually haunted by its repressed and yet intimate relation to politics. In this particular case, Kristeva, like Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, is interested in the place of aesthetics in the construction of national narratives. All three of these writers focus on aesthetics in order to oppose, in Bhabha’s words, the temptation of historicism presuming the self-evidence of the event and the transparency of language. Yet, in contrast to the linearity of realistic narrative evoked by Anderson as the model of national community, both Kristeva and Bhabha turn to the aesthetics of the uncanny in order to underscore the ambivalence and heterogeneity underlying national affiliations.

 

In Kristeva’s case, however, this recourse to aesthetics performs yet another function–it provides a certain mediation between the crisis of the psychic space, or what Kristeva calls the “destructuration of the self,” and the transformation of social relations. Therefore, it is only by disregarding this mediating role of aesthetics that we can confuse Kristeva’s critique of nationalism with psychologism, that is, with the explanation of social crisis in terms of unchangeable psychological phenomena. The attempt to seek in the aesthetics of the uncanny what Jay Bernstein calls “an after-image” of an alternative political practice is intertwined specifically with the question of affect and its place in social relations.¹¹ I would like to suggest that Kristeva’s reconstruction of an alternative “group psychology” on the basis of aesthetics and affectivity repeats Hannah Arendt’s strategy to recreate Kant’s political theory–the missing fourth Critique–on the basis of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement.¹² What Arendt retrieves from Kantian aesthetics is, first, an alternative sense of politics based on judgement rooted in affect–that is, on the mode of thinking the particular without the reference of the encompassing totality, rather than on the rational free will elaborated in the second Critique–and second, a model of political sensus communis implied by such a judgement. The greatest achievement of Kantian aesthetics, according to Arendt, lies in the destruction of the assumption that the judgements of taste, and therefore affectivity, lie outside the political realm. What aesthetics has in common with politics, therefore, is the presupposition of a certain community on the basis of the communicability of judgements and an inscription of affectivity in the public sphere. The turn to aesthetics allows, therefore, to supplement the discussion of nationality and political community based on rational will with the haunting question of affectivity and judgement.¹³

 

Although Kristeva shares with Arendt an approach to aesthetics as a place holder for the absent or alternative sense of politics, both ultimately appeal to different aesthetic phenomena and arrive at a different understanding of community. Arendt turns to the pleasure in the beautiful in order to reconstruct a community based on identification with others–achieved “by putting oneself in place of everybody else” and by sharing a commitment to public communicability of judgements, which, needless to say, presupposes a certain transparency of language. Kristeva, on the other hand, derives the alternative sense of politics neither from the aesthetics of the beautiful nor from the sublime, but rather from the Freudian aesthetics of the uncanny. In repeating the Freudian move “beyond the pleasure principle” on the level not only of psychoanalysis but also of aesthetics, she points to the far more drastic consequences of supplanting rational will with the notions of affect than Arendt is willing to acknowledge. By confronting us with the confusion and uncertainty of judgement, the negative affect of the uncanny reveals the erosion of the communicability of language and the instability of communal boundaries.

 

Let us recall that Freud’s analysis of the uncanny opens an inquiry into a “remote region” of aesthetics, neglected by the standard works of the discipline: “as good as nothing to be found upon this subject in elaborate treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime, that is with feelings of a positive nature . . . rather than with the opposite feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion.”¹⁴ In other words, the subject-matter Freud discusses is itself uncanny, which, although marginalized and removed from the field of aesthetics as such, nonetheless haunts even its most “obtuse” theoreticians. Freud sets up the relation between psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the beginning of the essay in terms of a corrective supplement: psychoanalysis illuminates what the traditional field of aesthetics fails to elaborate by adding a negativity of the uncanny to the positive articulations of the beautiful and the sublime. The implication of Freud’s argument is that even the Kantian articulation of the sublime is not radical enough since the initial pain generated by the failure of imagination to present the sublime object is compensated by the pleasure in the idea of the practical reason, “surpassing every standard of sense.”¹⁵

 

By the end of Freud’s discussion, however, the relationship between psychoanalysis and aesthetics is reversed: now it is psychoanalysis that is confronted with a residue of aesthetics, a residue which not only exceeds its competence but also questions its main premises of interpretation:

 

We might say that these preliminary results have satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and what remains probably calls for an aesthetic valuation . . . . One thing we may observe which may help us to resolve these uncertainties: nearly all the instances which contradict our hypothesis are taken from the realm of fiction and literary productions. (U, 401, emphasis added)

 

The remains of aesthetics contradict the hypothesis of psychoanalysis (in particular, Freud’s exclusion of the intellectual uncertainty or the confusion/conflict of judgement) and call instead for an “aesthetic valuation” of psychoanalysis itself. The most disquieting instance of the uncanny calling for such “an aesthetic valuation” occurs, according to Freud, when “the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality” and “then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility” (U, 405). The confusion of judgement brought about by the affect of the uncanny is perhaps most devastating in this case because it questions the boundaries of the common world, the progressive development of community, the surmounting of animalistic beliefs by modernity, and finally, the very distinction between the real and the imaginary: “there is a conflict of judgement whether things which have been ‘surmounted’ and are regarded as incredible are not, after all, possible” (U, 404). Characterized by the absence of any positive affect and by the confusion of judgement, the uncanny questions not only the parameters of aesthetics but also the boundaries of being in common–the boundaries which Freud’s own libidinal theory of political bonds sets up in Group Psychology. Itself the menacing double of Group Psychology, the uncanny haunts and unravels the communal bonds of identification produced by Eros. As Homi Bhabha remarks, “the problem is, of course, that the ambivalent identifications of love and hate occupy the same psychic space; the paranoid projections ‘outwards’ return to haunt and splitthe place from which they are made” (DN, 300).

 

I would now like to suggest more specifically how Kristeva’s analysis of the affect and the confusion of judgement produced by the uncanny intervenes in the concept of community represented by modern nationalism. As Benedict Anderson has argued in his influential Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, the formation of modern nation states is characterized by the imaginary logic of identification. A nation can be defined, therefore, as an imagined political community, because despite the physical dispersion of population, despite the conditions of exploitation and inequality, and, we have to add, despite the arbitrariness of language, the members of the nation imagine their belonging together as “communion,” comradeship, or fraternity: “The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”¹⁶ By the end of his discussion of the institutions and social processes that enable the rise and spread of nationalism–in particular, the appearance of the modern conception of “empty” historical time and arbitrary language, the convergence of capitalism with print technology, and the growing reading public–Anderson surprisingly admits that this institutional and cultural analysis fails to explain the crucial role of affect in the formation of national consciousness. It cannot explain why nation, the imaginary social formation dependent on the emptiness of time and language, inspires nonetheless self-sacrificing love among its members. Even more problematically, Anderson’s discussion fails to show the relation of this love to the hatred of racism: “It is doubtful whether either social change or transformed consciousnesses, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment that peoples feel for the inventions of their imaginations . . . it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.”¹⁷ Put in a different way, the mysterious “attachment” points to a curious tension between the rhetoric of emptiness, so consistently stressed in Anderson’s analysis of language and temporality, and the semblance of organicism and “fraternity” produced by imaginary identification. Although unexplained, affect is crucial in the formation of a national affiliation because it mediates between the emptiness of time and language, and the imaginary organic unity of the nation. Affect thus converts the empty signs into the emblems of “communion” and reifies the arbitrary signifiers into the expression of empathy.

 

Anderson’s acknowledgement of the importance of affect, which nonetheless is left without a theoretical elaboration, can help us to situate the political implications of Kristeva’s reading of the uncanny. Like Slavoj Zizek, Kristeva underscores the ambivalent role of affectivity in the process of national identification. For Zizek, let us recall, it is the enjoyment of the shared substance, of the “national Thing” uniquely embodied in the particular way of national life, that fills in the symbolic emptiness and thus endows the national bond with its seeming sociological solidity. The enigmatic “national Thing” fills the void on several levels: on the political level–the void of the Sovereign power created by democracy and capitalist economy; on the moral level, the void of the Supreme Good created by Kant’s formal conception of the categorical imperative; and, on the linguistic level, the void created by the arbitrary character of the sign. A collective fantasy, the function of nationalism is similar to the Kantian transcendental illusion of a direct access to the Thing: “This paradox of filling-out the empty place of the Supreme Good defines the modern notion of Nation. The ambiguous and contradictory nature of the modern nation is the same as that of vampires and other living dead: . . . their place is constituted by the very break of modernity.”¹⁸ As Zizek argues, national affiliation cannot be sustained merely by symbolic identification; it requires the supplementary function of affect, transforming the emptiness of formalism into the imaginary solidity of national community.¹⁹

 

What Kristeva’s discussion of the uncanny emphasizes is the ambiguity of such a supplement: the imaginary identification that fills the linguistic void becomes in turn a source of threat. Thus, the temporal and linguistic void not only undercuts the process of positive affective identification but also changes the very nature of affectivity at work in the formation of nationality. Perpetually threatened by the irruption of the irreducible difference within the imagined communal unity, the national bond is inseparable from the negativity of the uncanny. As the semiology of the uncanny suggests, the communal desire to “invalidate the arbitrariness of signs” and to reify them “as psychic contents” does not generate the feeling of belonging but its opposite, a threatening experience of strangeness (ST, 186). Anderson himself comes close to acknowledging the uncanniness of the national imagination when he considers its striking icon, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Instead of producing the fantasy of organic unity, the void of the tomb–indeed, a fitting figure for the emptiness of historical time and the gaps of arbitrary language–turns the national imagination into something ghostly: “Void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.”²⁰ If the arbitrariness of the sign opens a space for the secular national identification, it at the same time prevents the transformation of this void into “organic solidity.”²¹ As the primary reminder of the ghostly character of the imaginary identification, the figure of the foreigner disorients the judgment about belonging to the common world and thereby reveals the glaring gaps and discontinuities beneath the national affiliation. By juxtaposing the ideal of political love with the uncanniness of the “ghostly national imaginings,” Kristeva strives for a different conceptualization of belonging together, in which mutual affective identification is undercut by the very gaps and discontinuities of language.

 

As I have suggested at the beginning of this essay, another mediation between the disruption of the psychic space and the reconfiguration of the social relations is performed, in Kristeva’s argument, by ethics. Despite the numerous but nonetheless cryptic references to and remarks about ethics in her work, the reconstruction of the specific meaning of “ethics” in Kristeva’s project is not an easy undertaking. This is perhaps the case because Kristeva’s ethics of psychoanalysis does not offer a positive program–it does not formulate a set of rules for a new morality–but merely demands respect for an inassimilable alterity: “Psychoanalysis is then experienced as a journey into the strangeness of the other and of oneself, toward an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable” (ST, 182). If Kristeva’s analysis of aesthetics reveals an ambivalent role of affectivity in the formation of social relations, the turn to ethics calls for the transformation of this affect–of the political love haunted by the hatred of the other–into respect for alterity.

 

The “respect for the radical form of otherness” not only contests the reification of language (where the arbitrary signs become emblems of the communion with others) but also demystifies the identity of the symbolic order itself. As Kristeva writes in “Women’s Time,” the entwinement of aesthetics and ethics points to the limits of the symbolic as a system of exchange–a system, which sets equivalences among diverse elements: “It seems to me that the role of what is usually called ‘aesthetic practices’ must increase not only to counterbalance the storage and uniformity of information by present-day mass media . . . but also to demystify the identity of the symbolic bond itself, to demystify, therefore, the community of language as a universal and unifying tool, one which totalizes and equates.”²² The concern for the irreconcilable moves Kristeva to criticize both the imaginary communion of Einfühlung and the contractual community of language in so far as the symbolic totality subsumes differences into a system of equivalences. Not merely a celebration of linguistic indeterminacy, the respect for the irreconcilable poses a new demand for ethics

 

in order to emphasize the responsibility which all will immediately face of putting this fluidity into play against the threats of death which are unavoidable wherever an inside and an outside, a self and an other, one group and another, are constituted . . . . What I have called “aesthetic practices” are undoubtedly nothing other than the modern reply to the eternal question of morality.²³

 

This reference to responsibility suggests that the linguistic instability does not suspend the necessity of judging but reverses the stakes of judgement. If the aesthetic of the uncanny points to the impasse of judgement, ethics shifts the priority from the subjective faculty of judgment to the experience of being judged. As Kristeva’s famous formulation of the subject-in-process/on-trial suggests, the instability of the symbolic order and the fragility of subjective identity do not imply subjective complacency or the “happy” celebration of linguistic multiplicity but impose responsibility in the face of judgement coming from the other.

 

As I have argued elsewhere, such a minimal formulation of ethics that posits a “respect” for the irreconcilable in place of any positive program recalls Levinasian ethics.²⁴ Based likewise on the “respect” for the irreducible alterity, Levinas’s thought protests against the assimilation of otherness to the order of the same–against the absorption of alterity to the order of the subject, community, or linguistic totality. In order to prevent the assimilation of the other, which amounts in the end to the violent constitution of the other’s identity, Levinas underscores the irreducible exteriority or the excess of alterity overflowing both social formation and signifying systems. Yet, in what way can the Freudian notion of the uncanny open such a non-violent relationship to “the irreconcilable otherness” in Levinas’s sense? Perhaps one could risk a claim that the Levinasian ethic is itself uncanny, since encountering the other it describes always involves a profound displacement of the subject, an insurmountable disturbance of the domestic economy, a disruption of propriety and property–a calling into question of everything one wishes to claim as one’s own. In an uncanny resemblance to psychoanalysis, Levinas’s ethics takes us back to “the infancy of philosophy” in order to cure reason from its allergic reaction to “the other that remains other”:

 

Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity. From its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other that remains other–with an insurmountable allergy.²⁵

 

The heteronomous experience we seek would not be an attitude that cannot be converted into a category, and whose movement unto the other is not recuperated in identification.²⁶

 

Although it disrupts the economy of the proper, the heteronomous experience of “the fundamental strangeness” in Levinas’s work does not reproduce anxiety or fright, as is the case with the uncanny. On the contrary, it commands the subject to ethical responsibility for the other. Consequently, if Kristeva’s re-reading of the uncanny is to clear the ground for ethics, this interpretation has to negotiate the passage from fright–what Levinas calls “insurmountable allergy”–to responsibility.

 

In order to see how Kristeva navigates this passage from the horror of the other toward the respect for the irreconcilable, we need to clarify the difference between the alterity at the basis of Levinas’s (and Kristeva’s) ethics and the kind of otherness that manifests itself in the experience of the uncanny. As Kristeva is well aware, the experience of the uncanny does not consist in the encounter with the irreducible alterity of the other person–it is certainly not the face to face encounter in the Levinasian sense–but, on the contrary, it brings an unsettling recognition of the subject’s own strangeness. Underscoring the otherness that inhabits the subject from within, Freud’s analysis of the uncanny points to “an immanence of the strange within the familiar” (ST, 183). Not surprisingly, then, Kristeva suggests that the notion of the uncanny both belongs to and disrupts the “intimist” Romantic filiation: “with the Freudian notion of the unconscious the involution of the strange in the psyche . . . integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same” (ST, 181). Kristeva argues, however, that this difficult recognition of the irreconcilable alterity within the self is precisely what enables a non-violent relation to the other. In other words, the ethical encounter with the other, with the foreigner and the stranger, is inconceivable without the acknowledgement of alterity inscribed already within the most intimate interiority of the self. Thus although the uncanny is not equivalent to ethics, in so far as it “reconciles” us with the irreconcilable within ourselves, it opens its possibility.

 

Kristeva’s reading suggests an “improper” parallel between the strangeness disrupting the intimacy of the self from within and the irreducible exteriority of the other eluding any form of internalization. This strange parallel is what shatters any proper distinction between interiority and exteriority, immanence and transcendence. Needless to say, Kristeva’s interpretation of the uncanny repeats its paradoxical logic: the instability of the opposition between the inside and the outside, between interiority and exteriority, is unheimlich par excellence. In Freud’s well-known linguistic analysis, the ambivalence of the word “heimlich”–what is familiar, intimate, belonging to the home–“finally coincides with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’.” For Kristeva this instability of logic, the uncertainty of conceptual boundaries, is itself both a source and a symptom of the uncanny. She adds, however, another twist to this already convoluted and unstable logic by arguing that the uncanny coincidence of the most intimate interiority with the threatening exteriority is at the same time what upholds their radical non-coincidence. Put in a different way, “the immanence of the strange within the familiar” preserves the transcendence of the other in Levinas’s sense.

 

This added twist is at the core of the double movement of Kristeva’s argument: the first part of her argument, following Freud’s analysis, performs a certain internalization or inscription of otherness within the subject, whereas the second part reasserts the radical exteriority and non-integration of alterity. Kristeva claims that in order to elaborate an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable, otherness has to be seen as already constituting the subject from within: “A first step was taken that removed the uncanny strangeness from the outside, where fright had anchored it, to locate it inside, not inside the familiar considered as one’s own and proper, but the familiar potentially tainted with strangeness and referred to . . . an improper past” (ST, 183). This is what Freud refers to when he claims that “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (U, 394). Such externalization of what remains “irreconcilable” within the subject is especially emphasized by Freud in the context of the uncanny doubling: it is “the impulse towards self-protection which has caused the ego to project such a content outward as something foreign to itself” (U, 389). Consequently, Kristeva argues that the exteriority of the uncanny is merely an effect of a defensive projection of the narcissistic self: “the archaic, narcissistic self, not yet demarcated by the outside world, projects out of itself what it experiences as dangerous or unpleasant in itself, making of it an alien double . . . . In this instance the strange appears as a defense put up by a distraught self” (ST, 183).

 

The first part of Kristeva’s argument unravels, then, defensive projections, but at the high price of a radical disintegration of the subject. By relocating “the irreconcilable” within the self, the uncanny might be more appropriately described as a destructuration of the self: “In short, if anguish revolves around an object, uncanniness, on the other hand, is a destructuration of the self” (ST, 188). Why does the paradoxical disintegration of the self remain for Kristeva a necessary condition for the acknowledgement of the radical exteriority of the other? The implication of Kristeva’s approach to ethics is that the encounter with irreducible alterity can emerge only at the end of a rigorous analysis of the way the other constitutes and is in turn constituted within the subjective experience. By confronting us with the difficulty we have in relation to the other (“The uncanny strangeness allows for many variations: they all repeat the difficulty I have in situating myself with respect to the other” [ST, 187]), the experience of the uncanny reveals the “fascinated rejection of the other” at the very center of the imaginary constitution of self.

 

To explain what Kristeva means by the “fascinated rejection of the other,” we need to turn now to her earlier work on the aporia of the primary identification–the aporia persisting in all the subsequent identifications in psychic life. Reworking of the mechanism of primary identification in Tales of Love, Kristeva not only stresses the semantic emptiness underlying this process but also calls attention to two very different modalities of otherness. Understood as a metaphorical shifting, primary identification functions as the transference of the not yet ego–the Beckettian not-I–into the place of the Other. The Other functions here as “the very possibility of the perception, distinction, and differentiation . . . that ideal is nevertheless a blinding, nonrepresentable power–a sun or a ghost.”²⁷ Called by Kristeva “the imaginary father,” this Other provides a place of unification, which is produced by a metaphorical condensation of the drive and the signifier. Yet if the transfer to the place of the Other opens the possibility of the fragile transformation of the not-I into an Ego, this unification is threatened by the emptiness of transference and, even more so, by the abjection of the “unnamable” otherness of the mother:

 

primary identification appears to be a transference to (from) the imaginary father, correlative to the establishment of the mother as “ab-jetted.” Narcissism would be that correlation (with the imaginary father and the “ab-jetted” mother) enacted around the central emptiness of that transference.²⁸

 

I would like to stress two points in Kristeva’s diagnosis of the aporia of primary identification. First, the objectless identification both preserves the emptiness of transference (which Kristeva sees as an antecedent to the symbolic function) and, at the same time, provides the means of defense against this void–it functions as a screen over the emptiness of transference. Second, as an obverse side of the fascinated rejection of the other, primary identification provides the means of defense against abjection.

 

We might say that the aporia of the objectless identification sets up two modalities of otherness and a double operation of displacement constitutive of the narcissistic self: on the one hand, the other becomes a metaphorical destination of sorts (even if this destination is only “seeming”), a place of a possible unification for the archaic not-I; but on the other hand, the unnamable otherness of the abject turns the fragile position of an I into a permanent exile. As Kristeva writes, abjection can be described as a perpetual displacement, disrupting even a temporary crystallization of identity: “the one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself) . . . and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings . . . Instead of sounding himself as to his “being,” he does so concerning his place: ‘Where am I?’ instead of ‘Who am I?’.”²⁹

 

Although in The Tales of Love Kristeva argues that abjection has to be offset by identification in order to demarcate an archaic narcissistic space, she nonetheless ends her discussion once again with the figure of an exile, which anticipates the predicament of the foreigner in Strangers to Ourselves. The work on identification prior to the mirror stage produces, paradoxically, a strayed Narcissus “deprived of his psychic space, an extraterrestrial with a prehistory bearing, wanting for love.”³⁰ This Narcissus in the throes of abjection can be read as an interruption of the primary identification, as the mark of a prior relation to the other that cannot be subsumed into even a “seeming” destination for an I. By repeating the effects of such an interruption, every subsequent encounter with the other provokes the narcissistic crisis: “Strange is indeed the encounter with the other–whom we perceive . . . but do not ‘frame’ within our consciousness. . . . I do not even perceive him, perhaps he crushes me because I negate him” (ST, 187). Is the rejection of the foreigner a narcissistic defense against the profound displacement experienced in the encounter with the other?

 

If such a violent rejection of the other is to be surmounted, then the I has to give up the fantasy of the proper self: proper self “no longer exists ever since Freud and shows itself to be a strange land of borders and othernesses ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed” (ST, 191). Although the uncanny shatters the imaginary integrity of the self, Kristeva argues that this destructuration of the self is a resource rather than a threat: “As . . . source of depersonalization, we cannot suppress the symptom that the foreigner provokes; but we simply must come back to it, clear it up, give it the resources our own essential depersonalizations provide, and thus only soothe it” (ST, 190, emphasis added). Depersonalization becomes a “resource” when, by undoing the defensive projections, it enables an encounter with the absolutely other. It is at this point in her discussion that Kristeva shifts the emphasis from the “irreconcilable” within the self to the encounter with the other who “activates” the experience of the uncanny–the other of death, the other of femininity, or finally, the foreigner: “While it surely manifests the return of a familiar repressed, the Unheimliche requires just the same the impetus of a new encounter with an unexpected outside element” (ST, 188). The impact of this new event remains ambiguous–it may lead either to psychosis or to an opening toward the new, toward the absolutely other: the uncanny experience “may either remain as a psychotic symptom or fit in as an opening toward the new, as an attempt to tally with the incongruous” (ST, 188). The resolution of this ambiguity depends on whether or not the self is successful in “a crumbling of the conscious defenses, resulting from the conflicts the self experiences with an other” (ST, 188). Such an opening toward the new and the incongruous, if we recall Kristeva’s earlier definition, constitutes precisely an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable: “Strange is the experience of the abyss separating me from the other who shocks me” (ST, 187). This is perhaps the most clear instance in Kristeva’s reading of Freud where the abyss within the subject maintains the abyss between the subject and the other, pointing to the limits of both subjective integration and intersubjective identification.

 

Since individual or collective identity is inextricably bound with a “fascinated rejection of the other,” Kristeva argues that only a departure from that logic of identity–from the affective Einfühlung at the heart of the organic Gemeinschaft to be sure, but also from its opposite, from the equivalences set up by the symbolic totality–can create non-violent conditions of being with others. No longer based on the common affective bond or the symbolic equivalences, the non-violent relations to others have to preserve the irreducible non-integration of alterity within the common social body: “Freud brings us the courage to call ourselves disintegrated in order not to integrate foreigners and even less to hunt them down, but rather to welcome them to that uncanny strangeness, which is as much theirs as it is ours” (ST, 192). Such a disintegrated community might appear, to refer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s argument, “inoperative.”³¹ Indeed, the paradoxical mode of solidarity with others–a solidarity which respects differences between and within subjects rather than seeking their reconciliation–does not work in the sense that it fails to produce a common essence. And yet, it is the only mode of being with others that refuses to obliterate alterity for the sake of collective identity. As Kristeva writes, with this notion of solidarity,

 

we are far removed from a call to brotherhood, about which one has already ironically pointed out its debt to paternal and divine authority–“in order to have brothers there must be a father” . . . On the basis of an erotic, death bearing unconscious, the uncanny strangeness–a projection as well as a first working out of death drive– . . . sets the difference within us . . . and presents it as the ultimate condition of our being with others. (ST, 192)

Notes

 

1.Kristeva’s work has produced many controversies and debates among feminist critics. See for instance, Judith Butler, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 79-93; Ann Rosalind Jones, “Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politic” Feminist Review 18 (1984): 46-73; Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 151-57, and the collection of essays, Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Routledge, 1993).

 

2.Nancy Fraser, “The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics,” Boundary 2, 17 (1990): 98.

 

3.In contrast to Fraser’s powerful critique of Kristeva’s project, Iris Young advances quite a different interpretation of Kristeva’s politics. In her influential essay, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” Social Theory and Practice 12 (1986), Young focuses precisely on what kind of a reconstruction of social relations could emerge from Kristeva’s notion of the subject as a heterogenous process. According to this reading, Kristeva’s theory not only does not “surrender the ability to understand intersubjective phenomena” but, on the contrary, it allows for a reconceptualization of group solidarity and political community beyond the notion of collective identity. For Young this different sense of belonging together corresponds to a different sense of politics–which she calls the politics of difference. However, if Young’s commitment to the politics of difference has been accepted within a large circle of feminist theorists–witness the proliferation of the recent anthologies like Practicing the Conflict in Feminism, ed. Marrianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990)–her claim about the political significance of Kristeva’s theory remains much more controversial.

 

4.Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 96. Subsequent references to this edition will be marked parenthetically in the text as ST.

 

5.Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291. Subsequent references to this edition will be marked parenthetically in the text as DN. One can also mention here a parallel project by Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism, in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).

 

6.See for instance Mladen Dolar, “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,” October 58 (1991): 6-23, p. 7.

 

7.My argument at this point opposes Norma Claire Moruzzi’s reading of Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. By ignoring the leading role of the Freudian concept of the uncanny in the structure of Kristeva’s argument, Moruzzi sees Kristeva “resorting to the traditional comforts of Enlightenment humanism.” See Norma Claire Moruzzi, “National Abjects: Julia Kristeva on the Process of Political Self-identification,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, 140.

 

8.The famous 1989 incident “l’affaire du foulard”–the expulsion from public school of three young women from North African families who insisted on wearing head-scarves–is but one instance of the tensions accumulating around immigrants in France, especially around Islamic immigrants from North Africa. For a detailed discussion of the role of this incident as a background for Kristeva’s text, see Moruzzi, “National Abjects,” 136-142.

 

9.Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York; Columbia UP, 1993), 15.

 

10.The politicization of aesthetics in Kristeva’s argument is intertwined with the problem of translation. One of the few instances where Freud does raise the issue of foreigners is during his terminological discussion of the uncanny in foreign languages. Although he cites the Greek word xenos, the word in which the strange coincides precisely with what is foreign, Freud immediately dismisses this new interpretative perspective by insisting that “foreign dictionaries tell us nothing new” and that other “languages are without a word for this particular variety of what is fearful.” What is raised yet not pursued in this example is the complex relation between the uncanny and the foreign, between the national language (represented both by the mother tongue and the mother’s body) and translation. Yet these seemingly futile exercises in translation (exercises that seem to reassure us about the good fortune of the native tongue by reminding us that foreign etymologies do not contribute anything new to the discussion) paradoxically situate the problematic of otherness at the limits of translatability–the limits that seem to affect primarily the language one wishes to call one’s own. By underscoring the important historical role national literatures and the philologies of national languages have played in the formation of modern nation-states, Kristeva at the same time underscores the political significance of this necessity and the impossibility of translation as the limit of nationalism.

 

11.J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1992), 11-16.

 

12.Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982).

 

13.For an interesting discussion of Arendt’s theory of judgement and of the controversies her theory has created, see Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), 101-138.

 

14.Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959): 368-69. Subsequent references to this essay are marked parenthetically in the text as U.

 

15.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 89.

 

16.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 26.

 

17.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 141.

 

18.Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, (Durham: Duke UP), 222. Zizek’s analysis of the “Thing” is based on Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 7, ed. Jacques-Allain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton), 19-84.

 

19.In light of Kristeva’s discussion, Zizek’s analysis would be particularly useful for explaining the “mystical” form of nationalism, based on the secret notion of Volksgeist, the origins of which Kristeva traces, beyond German Romanticism, in the writings of Herder. Rather than positing one model of national identification, however, she insist on the specificity of various historical forms of nationalism–in particular, on the difference between organic Volksgeist rooted in blood and soil and far more contractual idea of nationality implied by Montesquieu’s esprit général. Nations without Nationalism, 30-33.

 

20.Anderson, 9.

 

21.That is why Homi Bhabha suggests, for instance, that the national imagination needs the pedagogical to produce the semblance of “organic solidity.”

 

22.Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia), 210.

 

23.Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 210.

 

24.See my discussion in “Kristeva and Levinas: Mourning, Ethics, and the Feminine,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, 62-78.

 

25.Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. A. Lingis, Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986), 346.

 

26.Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” 348.

 

27.Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia, 1987), 41-42.

 

28.Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, 41-42.

 

29.Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 8.

 

30.Tales of Love, 382.

 

31.Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991).