Uncanny

The Uncanny Style of Kristeva's Critique of Nationalism

Ewa Ziarek

Department of English University of Notre Dame Krzysztof.Ziarek.2@nd.edu Postmodern Culture v.5 n.2 (January, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu

Copyright (c) 1995 by Ewa Ziarek, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, Oxford University Press.

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Uncanny

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

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[1] 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 *intra*subjective tensions and thereby

surrenders its ability to understand *inter*subjective 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

[2] In Kristeva's 1989 Etrangers a nous-memes, 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

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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.

[3] 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).

[4] 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

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Uncanny

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.

[5] 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

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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).

[6] 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.

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Uncanny

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.

[7] 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.

[8] 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

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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 Desir, 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).

[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

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Uncanny

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.

[10] 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

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political community based on rational will with the haunting question of affectivity and

judgement.13

[11] 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 judgments, 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

judgment, the negative affect of the uncanny reveals the erosion of the communicability

of language and the instability of communal boundaries.

[12] 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

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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

[13] 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

judgment) 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

judgment 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

judgment 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

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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 *split* the

place from which they are made" (DN, 300).

[14] 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

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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.

[15] 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

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Uncanny

[16] 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.

[17] 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

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Uncanny

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.

[18] 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 Einfuhlung

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^

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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.

[19] 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

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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.

[20] 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.

17

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[21] 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.

[22] 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

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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).

[23] 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.

[24] 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

19

Uncanny

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.

[25] 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^

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Uncanny

[26] 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?

[27] 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

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Uncanny

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.

[28] 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 Einfuhlung 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

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Uncanny

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)

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Uncanny

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.

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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.

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Uncanny

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.

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Uncanny

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 general%. 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."

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Uncanny

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).

28