The Strangeness of the Racialized Subject

Abstract

In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva casts the foreigner, whom we tend to place on the outside, as the foreigner within: "Strangely the foreigner is living within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder."1 The question for Kristeva is whether or not we should be able to live with others, with the foreigner, without making the foreigner the enemy or someone to be assimilated. She answers that our ability to live with others requires that we must live as others, recognizing the strangeness within ourselves. Kristeva is concerned with the problem of nationalism through which the foreigner brings to bear our peculiarity, while at the same time threatening our identity. The foreigner threatens the "we" and thus provokes the tendency to solidify the "we." In short, the "we" becomes jealous of its difference. Appearing as if without origin, the foreigner challenges the constituted origin of the nation-state. While Kristeva achieves a compelling ethical moment from which we can approach difference through understanding the instability, difference, and strangeness that constitutes and inhabits subjectivity, the efficacy of her attempt to draw out an ethics and politics on the basis of a conception of "strangers to ourselves," founded in the theory of the unconscious, might find its limitations in a discussion of race. Kristeva makes the boundary of the nation the site that constitutes foreignness within the social and political realm, and this makes the problem of race disappear. However, the notions of foreignness, internal difference, and biological or cultural hybridity are all terms related to the modern Western subject in ways that cannot be disassociated from colonialism and the discourse of race. With this background in mind, I will look to Fanon and Du Bois to give full expression to what it means to be a stranger to oneself in order to rethink the ethical and political implications of her project. These authors articulate the historical and social embodiment of such a notion and as such should be taken up in light of Kristeva's work. By taking seriously the racialized foreigner within national identity we can better understand the relevance of social and political struggles over questions of collective identities. Kristeva's understanding of how the native experiences the foreigner's presence rests on her previous elaboration of abjection. In order for the not-yet ego, still an undifferentiated being, to become demarcated, i.e., become a definitive subject, it must perform what can be considered a defensive act of exclusion. The not-yet ego must abject (repel and reject) the maternal entity in which exists the possibility of being swallowed up. Thus, it must separate through abjection in order to make a place for itself. What is abject, however, is not something absolutely other, but something that is part of itself, the part which also supports and nourishes: "I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself with the same motion through which T claim to establish myself."2 Through the process of abjection, a process of setting up the boundary of inside/outside, the not-yet ego will be able to differentiate itself from the maternal entity. However, the contents of abjection remain in a way that is not radical enough to establish "a differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established,"3 so that while primary repression is the mechanism for the possibility of the self/other or inside/outside distinction, it is never fully a clear separation. The consequence is that the very boundaries of subjectivity are always threatened and must be reinforced through repeated acts of exclusion. The experience of abjection returns in encounters in which we feel revulsion, violence, or loathing that we attach to or direct at an object. Abjection does not, in fact, have a definable object. …