sad sack of induction fallacies, It horrifies me to hear Kristeva's woebegone personal experiences projected into vague halftruths about the identity of the immigrant populace, Her positioning of the foreigner as an Abject entity holds these people in bad faith, with the discourse of this novel only limiting the potential of the immigrant as a viable and autonomous entity.
Furthermore, constant citations of the Ancient Greek philosophic greats is grating and unoriginal, I shut this book with a sour face, Kristeva does a fantastic job of tracing the etymology of the word foreigner and how its definition has
changed throughout times and different cultures, Fascinating reading written in a distinct prose style, Explores psychoanalytic theory and how the artificial self defines itself through the Other, Brugt som brugbar kilde ifb, med mit speciale om Young AdultlitteraturBeing an outsider and knowing what happens with tribal issues of acceptance of those like me, I love the revelation of Kristeva's exploration of otherness and feel validated for the first time.
Another, even less abashed bourgeois philosopher, I am deeply impressed with Kristeva's historical knowledge and research and her depiction of so many ancient and medieval social classes, Conflating them all into "The Foreigner," though, is precisely not what we should be doing, History in our moment must need be a barricade, Kristeva's meditation on the foreigner as a double of our own inner self isn't as lively and precise as some of her best work, but it's still very perceptive and worth a read.
The notion that the foreigner returns to us as a dark reflection of our inner being, and that we can only love or hate them to the degree that we accept or reject ourselves, is supported by many examples from antiquity to the modern era most especially, and obviously, Camus and Sartre.
There's a final section, seemingly as relevant today as it was when she wrote the book almostyears ago, about the new wave of migrants to France, and concerns about assimilation, that she incorporates into her thesis.
This all gets a bit abstract, and the language isn't as commanding as "Powers of Horror", largely thanks to a lot more psychoanalytical notions and jargon, but when she comes closest to the subject, you're still seeing an amazing mind at work.
Kristeva profundiza en la noción del extranjero en un libro precioso pero desparejo, Sus reflexiones están muy bellamente expuestas, sobre todo en los primeros capítulos, en los que aborda diferentes temas relacionados con el "sentir migrante" a través de una prosa que se aleja de la frialdad académica para intimar más con el lector que se presupone también extranjero, claro que no es requisito obligatorio para disfrutar del texto.
Sin embargo, esta subjetividad inicial, que para mí era gran parte del atractivo del libro, va perdiendo fuerza en cuanto entramos al recorrido histórico y Kristeva como migrante pasa a un segundo plano.
Más allá de este desequilibrio, me ha resultado una lectura interesante, reveladora por momentos el capítulo de Freud, y esto ya es más personal también muy balsámica.
La recomiendo. From Imogen Tyler's sitelink Revolting Subjects:
Arguably the strength of Kristevas thesis resides in her primary claim that we are strangers to ourselves: an emancipatory ssertion of the fundamental equality of all human beings.
However, the promise of this claim is immediately undone as Kristeva proceeds to deploy it as a means of disentangling xenophobic expressions of nationalism bad nationalism and liberal ideals of the French Republic good nationalism.
This becomes clear in Strangers to Ourselves when she writes that the interior impact of immigration often makes it feel as though it had to give up traditional values, including the values of freedom and culture that were obtained at the cost of long and painful struggles ibid.
:. A few pages later she adds, it is possible that the “abstract” advantages of French universalism may prove to be superior to the “concrete” benefits of a Muslim scarf ibid.
:Ahmed. Elsewhere she has argued that the wearing of the hijab by French schoolgirls is a psychic catastrophe Wajid, What Kristeva divulges in these contentious remarks is that the stranger is a body that is constituted as foreign and abject by the bodies of citizens who compromise the normative body politic of the French state.
As Ahmedsuggests, the political promise of Kristevas radical proposition of the universality of strangeness is negated by her invocation of the fetishized figure of the veiled woman, a postcolonial citizensubject who is perceived and experienced as a stranger despite her legal entitlement to equality.
Kristeva fetishizes this figure and produces her as a national abject who threatens the values of the French Republic, captured in the motto Liberté, égalité, fraternité, from within.
In December, Kristeva was one of a group of sixty French female public figures, including feminist activists, intellectuals and celebrities, who were signatories to a petition, published in the French edition of the womens magazine Elle, which called for a law against the wearing of the hijab in public places Winter.
Pretty cringe, Kristeva, College professor study on what it means to be a stranger, . . Philosophically and in mythology and literature,
Did not like the introduction at all, . . Have paused, not sure I will resume, A very good and interesting book about the foreign and being a foreigner, An analysis of what the foreign means for us and our society and culture,
The book begins from antiquity to the present day and attempts to show how foreignness and being foreign has developed over the centuries,
The book is challenging and not always easy to read, so not for everyone, But if you find the subject interesting, you can learn a lot, Forced by our culture to simultaneously consider an 'us' and an opposite 'other', an identical and its alien, the foreigner is mostly a metaphor of distance, a nonself that we construct within ourselves to stand in stark opposition to us.
We are foreigners to ourselves, Kristeva writes that the foreigner is a symptom, a signifier of the difficulty we encounter while living as an 'other',
With its very poetic writing that somehow establishes a feeling of tranquility while expounding aggression, this book for most parts is a cultural and historical examination of the 'foreigner'.
Contrasting cosmopolitanism with xenophobia against shifting backgrounds, Julia Kristeva tries to write about the foreigner in relation to an individual 'I', and about how by confronting the foreigner whom we simultaneously reject and identify with, we lose our boundaries.
Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder.
By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself, A symptom that precisely turns "we" into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible, 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.
The uncanny, the foreigner is within us, We are all our own foreigners, always from separated from others and from ourselves, Hierocles' concentric circles get larger and larger, solid. One of the most popular Kristevas book is discovering the question of identity, Today this question might be felled of empty determinations, Who am I How could I behave These problems were asked by ancient philosophers, but in modern culture they are essential again as every fundamental issue, Reading this book I couldnt really found out the fundamental answers, It seems that Kristeva deeply understands the meaning of question and she also correctly asks us about identity, But farther and farter it gets harder to understand where she sees the possible answers,
The most interesting sections of this work are the earliest chapters, Kristeva seems to run out of steam and stop abruptly once she begins to discuss foreignness and strangeness in contemporary culture, She analyzes her own experience in France and says that not really feels like at home, There is a closed cycle: she doesnt feel at home outside of France, Thats why she emphasizes the main core of her book: we are strangers for ourselves in this world in a way of existentialism, especially it reminds Søren Kierkegaard.
Kristeva writes: Free of ties with his own people, the foreigner feels “completely free”, Nevertheless, the consummate name of such freedom is solitude,
In this case it helpfully to read the ChapterKnowing who we are where Kristeva tries to understand not only cultural or social roots of our identity, but tries to examine ontological basis of it.
The main thesis of this and next chapters is that we are often wrong about why we do something and even about how we felt, The author reminds us about Cartesian tradition of subject and its feelings, But I dont think that is right step of analysis, because it goes away to abstract concepts from the main problem, I absolutely understand this logic and if I had a chance to write this research Id do it in the same way, Yet, I guess it is the wrong way where have been fully crashed many modern projects include the project of identity,
This book has helped me to realize how extremely we depend from our cultural background, When we try to run away from our culture we must rebuild not only ourselves, but also others, And every time it looks like endless game with mirrors,
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