Towards

a Border that Feels: Theorising Otherness in

Conversation with Julia Kristeva

by
Jana Lydia Vosloo

BA Honours Philosophy Research Paper

Supervisor: Prof. Louise du Toit

October 2017
TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 2

THE CRISIS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: BETWEEN BORDERS AND BELONGING ....................... 4

STRANGERS TO OURSELVES ............................................................................................... 6

WHO IS THE FOREIGNER? ........................................................................................................... 6
UNCANNY STRANGENESS ........................................................................................................... 9
THE STRANGER LIVES WITHIN ................................................................................................... 11

POWERS OF HORROR: ABJECT/ABJECTION ...................................................................... 13

APPROACHING ABJECTION ....................................................................................................... 13
DESTABILISING THE BORDERS THAT BINDS “US” ...................................................................... 15
THE HORROR OF THE (IMPROPER) OTHER ................................................................................ 17

THE ABJECT STRANGER: EMBODIMENT AND A RENEWED BODY POLITIC ......................... 19

RECONSTRUCTING AND RECONCILING KRISTEVA ...................................................................... 20
EMBODIED OTHERNESS ............................................................................................................ 22
LEAKY BODIES, LEAKY NATIONS ................................................................................................ 24

CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................... 26

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 29

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INTRODUCTION
With the current context of the global crisis surrounding national identity, refugees and
xenophobic violence in mind, this paper aims to investigate the otherness of the stranger within
the theoretical framework of the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Notably, the
philosophical enquiry pertaining to otherness is certainly no recent endeavour. In both
academic literature and societal language, many terms have been used to describe “the one who
is other to the nation” including the outsider, the foreigner, the stranger or the alien. By
definition, a stranger refers to someone unknown to oneself whereas a foreigner specifically
describes a person who comes from another country. According to such an understanding, not
all foreigners are strange and neither are all strangers foreign. Besides the fact that some people
are labelled as other, foreign or alien, these groups are also very often feared, cast out or
violently discriminated against. This paper therefore aims to understand and question how the
construction of otherness related to strangeness and foreignness manifests within the nation.
This will be done by specifically looking at Kristeva’s account of otherness as theorised in her
books Strangers to Ourselves and Powers of Horror.

In her book, Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Kristeva explores the notion of the stranger in a
foreign country. Through this, she provides both a historical and theoretical framework for
understanding the notion of the foreigner in all its intricacy, especially with regards to the idea
of strangeness within the self. In many ways, this book can be viewed as a direct response to
the problems of nationality that was faced in France at the time. According to her, France was
in a state of national depression of which one of the main causes was the influx of immigrants
(who were treated with hostility in return). Drawing very strongly from psychoanalytic theory,
Kristeva links the xenophobic drive within nation states back to a specific unconscious process
whereby we externalise or project onto an external stranger that which is strange or estranging
within ourselves (Kearney, 2002:15). She ends her book with the conclusion that we will only
be able to live in peace with strangers, foreigners and other kinds of ‘others’ as soon as we are
able to recognize ourselves as others, strange or foreign.

In her earlier book, Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection (1980), Kristeva draws on both
Freud and Lacan to provide an account of the abject, a term which can be understood within

2
the post-structuralist context as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity or that
which blurs the lines between what is self and what is other. Accordingly, the abject exists
somewhere in between the object and the subject, representing taboo elements of them both.
Linked to this, abjection can be understood as the process by which one separates one’s sense
of self from that which one considers intolerable (abject), and which lies on the border between
self and other. The abject can also be described as the other within the self which is cast off in
a primordial repulsion from which the self or the “I” is born, or from which it emerges as an
independent or separate identity. Examples of the abject/ abjection can therefore include things
such as childbirth, menstruation, purging or vomiting. This concept is also very often linked
to that of the uncanny (something strangely familiar), a concept developed by Freud which
Kristeva also uses in Strangers to Ourselves to illustrate her notion of the stranger within.

Even though Kristeva’s theory of abjection and her conceptualisation of the foreigner are
clearly related to each other, Kristeva hardly makes the parallels between the two books
explicit. For this reason, this paper explores the ways in which Kristeva’s emphasis on
recognizing the stranger within ourselves in her book Strangers to Ourselves can be reconciled
with her conceptualisation of the abject/abjection in her earlier book Powers of Horror. This
paper therefore aims to not only provide a detailed exposition of her two separate accounts
relating to otherness, but also to explicitly reconcile these theories in order to give an account
of the stranger-as-abject. Consequently, my argument will be based on the premise that the
otherness of the stranger is linked to its being labelled as abject by the numerous ways that it
destabilises the borders of national identity and collective belonging. Moreover, I want to put
forth that the body should be included as a primary model when theorising otherness as it can
broaden our conceptualisation of a nation which transcends the boundaries of exclusion. This
paper thus envisions an embodied body politic which considers a feminist understanding of the
body as a model for the nation in the hope that the stranger will no longer be abjected, but
rather, welcomed with hospitality instead of being treated with hostility.

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THE CRISIS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: BETWEEN BORDERS AND BELONGING
Before I can proceed to analyse and reconcile the arguments put forth by Kristeva, it is
necessary to briefly expound on some of the contextual information and key terms which
frames my overall inquiry. As during the time when Kristeva was concerned about the crisis
of national identity in France, the world is in a crisis once more. My impetus for this particular
investigation can thus in many ways also be seen as a direct response to the current
migration/refugee crisis and the ways in which it manifests both globally and locally.

Since 2015, the world has been faced with a global refugee crisis of historic proportions. Up
until now, the number of refugees and displaced people have reached close to 65 million world-
wide, the largest number since World War II (UNHCR, 2017). During this time, the global
community have struggled to engage with the immense needs of men, women, and children
living in refugee camps, make-shift shelters and even open fields or city streets. Furthermore,
it is known that more than half of all refugees come from just three countries: Syria,
Afghanistan and Somalia and it is developing regions who host 86 percent of all refugees.
Additionally, the U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that more than 1.19 million people will need
to be relocated in the upcoming year (UNHCR, 2017). This need was countered by a renewed
call for “closed-border” policies and xenophobic violence, as seen for example in the Trump
presidency and in the move towards Brexit. In other words, morally and politically, many
people do not find any moral commitment or obligations to others beyond their national borders
of belonging to be a significant one.

While taking this context into account, I would like to briefly explore the notion of national
identity. National identity can be defined as one's identity or sense of belonging to one state or
to one nation. It is the sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by supposedly
distinctive traditions, culture, language and politics. To a large extent then, national identity is
viewed in psychological terms as "an awareness of difference" or a "feeling and recognition of
'we' and 'they'”. Many who cherish the idea of the nation also seem to assume that national
identity is a kind of national essence that exists in the very fabric of the nation’s land, culture,
and people.

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However, Wodak (2009: 22) argues that national identity is not innate, but rather a product of
discourse. For this reason, she notes that communities are to be distinguished from one another
not by their authenticity, but as Anderson (2004) said ‘by the way in which they are imagined’.
By implication then, the image of a nation or national culture is real only to the extent that one
is convinced of it, believes in it and identifies with it emotionally (Wodak, 2009:23). Following
this idea that national identity is discursively and imaginatively constructed, Richard Kearney
(2002:8) rightfully notes that the history of Western metaphysics is based on a logocentric
prejudice against the other which frames alterity as a threat to collective identity. It is thus the
borders and boundaries which are created by means of the very notion of national identity
which enables collectives to distinguish between the collective “we” and the foreign “them”.
In this sense then, the contrast between the native’s need for secure borders and boundaries and
the foreigner’s desire for a dignified sense of belonging and recognition becomes all the more
pronounced.

Kearney (2002:8) goes on to mention that most nation states are determined on safeguarding
their body politic from “alien viruses”- a kind of logic and discourse which seek to
“pathologise” their enemies. When faced with the threatening outsider, the best mode of
defence is always attack. To avoid this, borders are constantly policed to keep nationals in and
foreigners out. This can be referred to as the politics of inclusion and exclusion.

Basically, the Same can be recognized on condition that it be against an Other. Thus, the
identity of the Self or Same is structurally and logically dependent on the exclusion of specific
Others, and paradoxically, those Others become central to the coherence and endurance of the
identity of the Self or Same. For a full and nuanced understanding of the ways discourses of
national identity are implicated in the politics of inclusion and exclusion, it is crucial to
recognize that national imaginaries are very often also gendered and racialized. This
understanding of national identity also allows one to make sense of why some, even within the
nation, are stranger than others. This leads me to question the link between the construction of
national identity and the xenophobic violence that occurs to those who are outsiders. In the
subsequent sections, this tension between national identity and those who fall outside of it will
remain at play as the backdrop of my investigation.

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STRANGERS TO OURSELVES
This section aims to provide a detailed exposition of Kristeva’s main arguments put forth in
Strangers to Ourselves, specifically with regards to the identity of the foreigner, her reading of
the uncanny and the notion of the stranger within. Lastly, I will also briefly mention some of
the implications and limitations of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theorisation of otherness.

Who is the Foreigner?

Strangers to Ourselves provides us with an elaborate account of the foreigner as traced by
Kristeva within a personal, historical, legal and national framework. Kristeva (1991:1) starts
her first chapter with what seems to be a personal and almost phenomenological account of the
foreigner by remarking that the foreigner lives within us, that he1 is the “hidden face of our
identity” and that by recognizing him within ourselves we are emancipated from detesting the
‘him in himself’”. Kristeva (1991:2), elaborates on this idea by noting that the foreigner enters
as soon as the consciousness of my own difference arises and, conversely, he will disappear
when we all are able to acknowledge ourselves as foreigners. Fittingly, Kristeva (1991) named
this chapter Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner, in a way melodically pre-empting something
of the different within the same, the return of the subject, and of an “acknowledged and
harrowing otherness”. However, this position raises various questions such as: how are we able
to identify ourselves as foreigners? Are there not different degrees of strangeness and
displacement? How does the foreigner in oneself relate to the other’s foreigner in himself and
how does this recognition translate into social reform?

It might thus be useful to firstly consider what Kristeva’s conception of the foreigner is before
we move on to reflecting on what it means to recognise the foreigner in oneself. Kristeva
(1991:3) describes the foreigner as someone “not belonging to any place, any time or any love”,
someone without a home, who is constantly busy “multiplying masks and false selves”. She
says, “fixed within himself, the foreigner has no self”. Unable to take root, the stranger has a

1
Kristeva refers to the foreigner as “him” throughout her book. This is interesting as she does
mention that, historically, some of the first foreigners were women. Perhaps her intention is a
feminist re-writing of the script, replacing the “stranger her” with the “stranger him”. Even
though I remain vague about her intentions, for the purposes of this paper, I will also refer to
the foreigner as “him”.
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lost origin and constantly “misses the glory of being beyond: having merely the feeling of
reprieve, of having gotten away” (Kristeva, 1991:8). In this sense, the foreigner is always
elsewhere, belonging nowhere, “merely surviving with a tearful face turned towards the
homeland” (Kristeva, 1991:10). Furthermore, the foreigner is like an orphan without any
friends, confined to temporary meetings where the foreigner is only momentarily welcomed.
According to Kristeva (1991:19) this experience of the foreigner also infiltrates into his sexual,
national, political and professional identity. It can also be said that this experience can be linked
closely to that of the refugee figure today.

Subsequently, Kristeva also elaborates on the way in which the foreigner was historically
constructed and perceived2. She discusses the foreigner in Greek tragedy, in the Bible, in
literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the twentieth century.
Dobson (2001:84) notes that throughout her discussion of the historic development of the
foreigner, the thread of cosmopolitism3 is preserved. For example, the Greek treatment of the
foreigner is related to the idea of a person with limited rights in the polis, linking to Stoic
Cosmopolitism. There are also many texts within the biblical context which urge us to accept
and welcome foreigners. Interestingly, many of these texts also rely on the premise that because
you were once a foreigner, you should now welcome them4.

Kristeva also mentions that nationalism has become a totalitarian symptom of the 19th and 20th
century as it hunts down the foreigner. For Kristeva (1991:99), the logic of the nation state
establishes itself based on certain exclusions and therefore it surrounds itself with certain
structures (such as strict border patrol and foreign policy) to confront what is perceived to be
the problem of foreigners. Because of this, most nation states are focused on preserving their
body politic from the “threatening foreigners” who seek to “invade” them. It is also in this

2
Even though an in-depth elaboration on her insights regarding the historical development of
the foreigner is beyond the scope of this essay, it is perhaps sensible to briefly mention some
of her most prominent findings.
3
The ideology that all human beings belong to a single community.
4
For example “You must not molest the stranger or oppress him, for you lived as strangers in
the land of Egypt” and “You must count him as your own countrymen and love him as
yourself.”.
7
sense that we are so attracted to the idea of naturally being citizens and necessary products of
the nation state. Due to this, the foreigner is automatically the one who challenges both the
identity of the group and his own. His very being simultaneously announces “I am not like
you” and “recognize me” to the extent that he is received with both fascination and repulsion.
To this end, the foreigner will always be defined in a negative fashion as the other, the one who
does not belong to the state in which we are, the one who does not have the same nationality
as the rest (Kristeva, 1991:96). In short, it can be said that most ideas surrounding identity
have been historically constructed in relation to some notion of alterity.

In addition to this, the construction of the foreigner was also connected to the way in which he
was legally defined. According to such a definition, a foreigner can be understood as “a person
who is not a citizen of the county in which he resides”. To this definition, Kristeva responds
by noting that such a legal framework is indeed comforting, as it allows one to justify and
validate the “prickly passions aroused by the intrusion of the other in the homogeneity of a
family or group” by means of the law. These legal structures manifests on various practical
levels. A prominent example of this which Kristeva addresses, is the denial of the foreigner’s
right to vote. This refutation almost automatically excludes the foreigner from any decision-
making process concerning rudimentary ways of living. Consequently, this denial implies a
refusal of personal right to the foreigner as he is constantly in a position where he needs to ask
for permission from higher authorities to be- from the ones who sought to reject him in the first
instance. To this extent, the foreigner is structurally reduced to merely a passive object amid
the natives who belong.

From this point of view, it becomes clear that the process of identifying ourselves as foreigners
was historically and legally pre-determined to such an extent that certain people are
automatically deemed foreigners. The societal structures therefore make our knowledge of who
foreigners is (or should be) disappointingly self-evident. However, Kristeva (1991:103) notes
that despite this, the foreigner can respond by declaring “one does not give me a place, therefore
I shall keep my place” or; “I belong to nothing, to no law, I circumvent the law, therefore I
myself make the law”.

8
For this reason, Kristeva regards the foreigner as a ‘symptom’ on both a psychological and
political level. On the one hand, he signifies the difficulty we have of living as an other with
others, and on the other, he emphasises the limits of nation states and the national political
conscience which characterizes him as other. The foreigner exposes the deeply interiorized
belief that deems it normal for there to be foreigners, that is, people who do not have the same
rights that we do. For Kristeva (1991:133) then, the foreigner is none other than the alter ego
of the national man, he is the one who reveals the latter’s inadequacies at the same time as he
points to the defects in certain traditions and institutions. Perhaps then when we speak of the
otherness of the stranger, we speak of it as an overarching otherness which in itself is a result
of a refusal to include various already existing identities of difference (e.g. race, gender, sexual
orientation etc.).

In answer to my initial concern regarding the possibility of social reform from the mere
recognition of foreignness within the self, Kristeva’s idea (1991:134) that the foreigner
becomes a metaphor for the distance at which we should place ourselves to revive the dynamics
of ideological and social transformation turn out to be noteworthy. In other words, for her,
there need be a theory of cultural difference that is to be preserved and developed to modify
the simplistic attitudes of rejection or indifference, as well as the often arbitrary or utilitarian
decisions that today regulate the relationships between foreigners. For Kristeva (1991:104),
this is important because everyone is becoming foreigners in a world “that is more than ever
heterogeneous beneath its apparent scientific and media-inspired unity”. Thus, one of the core
question which can be deduced from the former discussion of the societal construction of the
stranger in all its intricacy, is whether it will ever be possible to live with others without calling
them strangers? As Kearney asks: “Are we capable of accepting new modalities of otherness
without banishing and demolishing them?” Or as Kristeva phrases it: “How can we then go
about promoting togetherness of those foreigners that we all recognize ourselves to be?”.

Uncanny Strangeness
Kristeva seeks for the answers to the above-mentioned questions within the ethics of
psychoanalysis, specifically within her reading of Freud’s concept of the uncanny. The concept
uncanny is derived from the term unheimlich (unhomely) which refers to that which is

9
hidden/concealed from the self. Uncanny strangeness thus refers to the strange within the
familiar. More precisely, that which is strangely uncanny is that which once was familiar, and
under certain conditions emerges. Kristeva acknowledges the Freudian origin of the uncanny
and adds that the uncanny becomes alienated through repression. This reading is also a direct
response to her concerns regarding the dangerous consequences of the Enlightenment notion
of modern nation states. She therefore aims to apply Freud’s psychological notion of the
uncanny directly to the crisis of national identity and its effects on our ability to confront
alterity. As Ziarek (1995:3) rightfully notes, the concept of the uncanny can create a discursive
space for an alternate concept of sociality removed from the violence of xenophobia which
underlies most national affiliations.

Furthermore, the uncanny can also be equated with the unconscious. Kristeva (1991:181)
argues that the unheimliche can be viewed as a collapsing of conscious defences, resulting from
the frictions that the self experiences with an other – the strange –with whom it maintains a
conflictual bond (a simultaneous need for identification with an other and a fear of it).
Accordingly, Kristeva thinks that it is possible that the other is one’s “own and proper”
unconscious”. The self is thus able to project out of itself what it experiences as threatening or
hostile, making itself uncanny. Accordingly, the strange emerges as a guard put up by a
distressed self and the uncanny then becomes alienated through the process of repression. Once
these defence mechanisms of protection against alterity are to be relaxed or removed, there is
a possibility of either falling to a psychotic breakdown or rising to new ways of being with
others.

In the case of the former, uncanniness is a destruction of the self that may remain as a psychotic
symptom. In other words, through this process of confronting the foreigner whom is rejected
and at the same time identified with, the boundaries of the self become lost. If the foreigner is
within us, then we are in fact, fighting our unconscious when we flee from our struggle against
the foreigner. In this sense, an elimination of the strange can lead to a rejection of the psyche
and in this case, we remain incapable of accepting the other within ourselves as well as the
other within the Other. In response to this, Kristeva (1991:190) argues that we transfer this

10
unbearable fear of the strange within ourselves onto the unsuspecting strangers which we call
our worst enemies.

Nonetheless, the uncanny also provides us with the alternative opportunity to open ourselves
towards the new, as an attempt to tally with the strange. Kearney (2002:17) notes that through
this process, a primal space of ‘alterity’ can be situated within the supposed unity and
homogeneity of human consciousness; “the alien at long last admitted as an integral inhabitant
of the ‘same’”. A psychoanalytic depiction of the uncanny therefor provides one with a
hermeneutic capable of “dephatologising the other”.

Strangely, there is no explicit mention of foreigners within the unheimliche. However, it can
be argued that even though Freud does not speak explicitly of foreigners, he provides the
opportunity for detecting foreignness in ourselves. In this way, Kristeva thinks that Freud
brings forth the courage to call ourselves fragmented in order not to integrate and hunt down
foreigners, but rather to welcome them to that uncanny strangeness, which belongs as much to
them as us. Psychoanalysis can thus be viewed as a journey into the strangeness of the other
and of oneself, towards an ethics of respect for that which seemingly cannot be reconciled.
This may be regarded as an invitation “not to petrify the foreigner, not to petrify him as such,
not to petrify us as such, but to analyse him by analysing us” (Kristeva, 1991:178).

The Stranger Lives Within

It now becomes increasingly clear how Kristeva’s reading of the uncanny is instrumental
towards her key notion that we our strangers to ourselves. In her concluding remarks, she
(almost too repetitively) elaborates on this notion. She notes, “uncanny, foreignness is within
us: we are our own foreigners, we are “our own strangers-divided selves”. Kristeva therefore
proposes that it is through the process of psychoanalysis that one can acknowledge that “the
foreigner is within me; hence we are all foreigners and If I am a foreigner, there are no
foreigners”. Differently said, if each of us can accept that we are strangers, then there are no
strangers- only others like ourselves. It is therefore on the basis of the other that one is able to
reconcile one’s own otherness. For this reason, the foreigner is no longer a race or a nation,

11
but rather an integral part of the same. It is precisely the difference within us in its most
incomprehensible form that grants us with the ultimate condition of our being with others.

As a counter to the nation state, Kristeva (1991:192) envisions a society whose unity is founded
on the “consciousness of its unconscious”. She notes that a paradoxical community is emerging
that consists of foreigners who are reconciled with themselves to the extent that they recognize
themselves as foreigners. Tyler (2013:31) argues that for Kristeva, this involves the forging of
a more cosmopolitan, liberal and enlightened European citizen-subjects. For this to take place,
Kristeva suggests that we extend to the notion of foreigner the right of respecting our own
foreignness and, in short, of the privacy that ensures freedom in democracies. In other words,
she thinks that if we can come to terms with our aversive emotion in private spaces, they might
not spill out in public domains, making for a more tolerant form of national belonging.

Is this psychoanalytic cure to xenophobia a convincing way of theorizing otherness? Kearney

(2002:19) mentions that perhaps Kristeva’s approach is too quick in its tendency to reduce
alterity to a dialectic of the unconscious psyche. Agreeably, it seems as though our
understanding of the otherness of the foreigner becomes somewhat limited through the
application of a strictly psychoanalytic approach. I will therefore briefly elaborate on some of
the possible restrictions which could result from a rigorous application of Kristeva’s
psychoanalytic approach.

Perhaps most notably, a psychoanalytic approach tends to be very individualised. Given, this
individualisation is mostly justified due to the specificity of each psychoanalytic patient.
However, Kristeva makes a collective psychoanalytic diagnosis and as such, perhaps the model
also needs to be adapted. Ziarek (2015) argues that Kristeva focuses to exclusively on intra-
subjective tensions which prevents her from engaging intersubjective notions of strangeness.
For example, how does one account for the fact that some foreigners are perceived as a lot
stranger than others? In for example the South African context, it appears very often that
European foreigners would be treated vastly better than foreigners of other African countries.
In this sense, the psychoanalytic approach also too easily tends to be a-historic in its
application. By this, I mean that it does not adequately acknowledge the numerous ways in

12
which the inner workings of the psyche are historically constructed rather than merely the
effects of maternal repression.

Ziarek (1995) also accuses Kristeva of psychologizing and aestheticizing the problem of
political violence. Can the subjective fear of one’s internal otherness really relate to the brutal
physical and emotional violence which so many foreigners endure daily? Moreover, Ziarek
(1995) also doubts the possibility of theorising about group formations such as national identity
without reference to collective identities. She adds to this idea by noting that the link from the
psychic space to the transformation of the social space is unclear. In other words, is the notion
of subjective anxiety which causes national depression enough to initiate social reform? With
these limitations in mind, I now move to Kristeva’s earlier work in the hope that her theory of
abjection could bring me closer to a theorisation of intersubjective otherness.

POWERS OF HORROR: ABJECT/ABJECTION

As mentioned earlier, my incentive for providing an exposition of Kristeva’s notion of the
abject and the process of abjection is mostly in the hope of extending her understanding of the
foreigner provided in Strangers to Ourselves. This will be done in order to try and resolve the
aforementioned concerns to more adequately engage the current crisis surrounding national
identity. For this reason, I will specifically focus on the abject with the prospect of better
understanding the foreigner as the stranger within. Second, I want to include a reading of
Powers of Horror which considers the disruption of borders and boundaries (by means of the
process of abjection) in a way that equates the sense of self disrupted by the abject to the way
in which the foreigner disrupts the national identity of the nation state. Lastly, I aim to
investigate how the terminology pertaining to filth, horror and disgust so predominantly
mentioned in Kristeva’s discussion of the abject, can be linked with the psychoanalytical
account for the origin of xenophobic violence.

Approaching Abjection
Linked to the literal notion of being cast out, the process of Abjection describes the ongoing
processes of separating one’s sense of self from that which infringes on your sense of self (the
abject). In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva provides her account of

13
abjection. Kristeva (1982) describes the abject as “neither inside nor outside, neither subject
nor object and neither self nor other”. From this in between space, the abject is disturbing
identity and order with the unsteadiness of boundaries, borders, and restrictions. Accordingly,
the abject reveals the unevenness of the subject/object divide, the fragile nature of identity and
the need to establish oneself against the threat of, and desire for, dissolution.

Kristeva’s theory of abjection developed from her earlier work on the subject formation of
infants and the maternal self. Kristeva (1982: 29) chiefly argued that the infant, while securing
a separate sense of its body-self, becomes separated from its original ‘maternal home’. For this
reason, the infant subject is hereafter always ‘out of place’, feeling almost permanently exiled.
It is also appropriate to note that in Kristeva’s narrative, all human desires, insecurities, fears
and creativity stem from this initial expulsion from the “m/otherland”, which is integrated
within the infant at the very moment of its ‘birth’ as a conscious being, as an inner loss of place.
Through the process of travelling beyond the border of the mother’s body, the birthed subject
is forever bound to enact the process of abjection by means of the ordering and demarcation of
her or his world.

For this reason, the abject can also be called the primally repressed as this process of abjection
takes place prior to (and as part of) the formation of any identity. Kristeva refers to primal
repression as “the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide,
reject, repeat”. In this way, abjection, for Kristeva, can be regarded as sites of psychical (and
social) crisis. In them, the fragile processes of ego-formation constantly risk collapse. In other
words, it is possible that the self could relapse to an aggressivity when faced with the toil of
clarifying the boundaries of the self. As Kristeva (1982:15) notes “the abject is the violence of
mourning for an object which has always already been lost”.

Kristeva also suggests that practices and experiences of abjection have a cathartic function for
the subject, operating as forms of purging which give expression to a continual need to secure
a narcissistic hygienic fantasy of a clean, whole and proper self through the performative
enactment of self/other and self/object distinctions. For Kristeva, this process primarily takes
place within the site of the body and she consequently places emphasis on experiences which

14
unsettle bodily integrity. To this, Kristeva (1982) offers the examples of death, decay, fluids,
orifices, sex, defecation, vomiting, ill- ness, menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth. These
examples all blur the borders of the self by being part of the self from a position outside the
self.

The abject/abjection therefore also acts as safeguards insofar as it protects the subject by
making the border the object. Moreover, abjection is above all an ambiguity. While releasing
a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it, on the contrary, abjection
acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. The abject appears in order to uphold “I” within the
other. It is therefore the very action of othering which helps to establish a secure sense of self.
As Kristeva (1982:3) states, ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same
motion through which “I” claim to establish myself’ Thus, subjectivity is, in Kristeva’s
account, always in revolt against itself.

Destabilising the Borders that Binds “Us”

Kristeva’s theory of the abject and the process of abjection also makes for an interesting basis
to further investigate the notion of bordering and the seemingly inherent need for creating
boundaries. In essence, the notion of the abject is established by the fundamental opposition
between inside and outside. According to Kristeva, our lives are in many ways maintained by
this process of abjection as part of a constant attempt to keep this boundary between inside and
outside intact. For her, the most important boundary of all can be viewed as the one which
separates the self from the outside world. To protect this boundary, the abjecting subject
continuously endeavours to generate a space, a distinction, a border, between herself and the
polluting object, thing or person. Abjection therefore describes the ongoing processes of
bordering that make and unmake both the psychological and material boundaries of the subject.
This is achieved, mostly, by rejecting any thoughts or ideas which have the ability of
threatening the ego/ the boundary of the self.

This boundary between the self and the non-self, therefore also functions as one of our only
means of establishing that which is familiar and that which is strange, and by implication
threatens our ego. So, what is it that threatens the boundary of the self? Kristeva (1982:10)

15
mentions that abjection is experienced when the Other is settled in place of or instead of what
would be the self. This Other is not one who we identify or incorporate, but rather an Other
who to a large extent precedes and possesses the self, and through such a possession causes it
to be. In other words, it is within the very process of excluding the Other that we secure our
borders of self out of which the ego can emerge.

In a forceful way then, abjection refers to a body that becomes separated from another body
in order to be. Similarly, nations are defined by their borders and one could argue it is almost
exclusively able to exist through the process of refusing entry to the strange. By rejecting the
Other, the same is able to reaffirm its sense of self. Interestingly, in Ahmed’s (2004) reading
of Kristeva, she notices how the border can become an object that the subject can manage
through the process of abjection. However, that which is transformed into an object through
abjection, will, according to her, always function as a substitute threat, rather than being a
danger in and of itself (Ahmed, 2004).

More precisely, abjection enables one to identify the border objects that come to the front as
something one should be fearful of. However, this identification is constantly a momentary
manifestation of another deep-seated fear. As Kristeva (1982: 67) notes, abjection is “an
extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic, and which is above all a revolt
of the person against an external menace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance,
but of which one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but that it may
menace us from the inside”. In this way, the numerous bad objects established through
abjection are thus always scapegoats.

Related to this, Tyler (2013:28) elaborates on the idea of abjection as a social occurrence with
possible political implications. According to her, Kristeva’s conceptualization of the process
of abjection is more successful than her account of that which is abjected. In other words, her
focus is more extensively on the violence of separation which brings objects/Others into being
and less on the expelled, non-objects themselves. However, Tyler (2003:28) does think that
Kristeva’s work provides the theoretical framework to consider who endures the burden of
abjection and why some are scapegoated as inhuman, animal or alien. She therefore argues that

16
the egoic instability which Kristeva ascribes to the individual, can also be impelled into the
political realm through social reinforcement. The strangeness which is experienced at the
boundaries of identity formation can this also recur within our relations with others, especially
those who are marginalised. Meaning, social life is equally contingent on the idea of
“containing disorder and disruption, and managing the fear of contamination” (Tyler, 2013:29).

With the above-mentioned in mind, abject theory seems to provide a powerful account of
bordering which can be well employed to make sense of the otherness of the stranger within
an investigation of xenophobia. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Kristeva (1982:10) speaks of
the abject as “an exile who asks, where?”. However, concerning boundaries and borders, a few
questions remain. Particularly, what is it that keeps collectives from embracing the possibility
of destabilised borders? Is it the case that our need for borders is simply related to a matter of
self-defining or ego formation? Baird (2013:6) notes that boundaries serve to separate entities,
rendering them unique and distinguishable. Horror, confusion and fear result when boundaries
are made obsolete and entities begin to blur together. In the following section I will briefly
investigate how narratives of fear, horror and disgust contributes to the continuous need for the
process of abjection and the upholding of borders, both individually and socially.

The Horror of the (improper) Other

As aforementioned, the abject is a concept that is often used to describe bodies and objects that
one finds repulsive or disgusting, and to preserve one's identity they are cast out. Indeed, as the
title of this book suggests, the abject is powerfully horrifying, repellent, but also intriguing.
Once something (or someone) is abjected, it is generally regarded as that which is improper
and unclean in opposition to the proper self. Baird (2013:5) notes that we experience a sense
of uncanniness or horror when “what is outside of this boundary is familiar and what is inside
this boundary is foreign, as this contributes to rendering the boundary as obsolete”. For
example, we typically think of blood within the body as normal and natural (something that we
need for us to survive), however as soon as it is seen from outside the body (e.g. menstrual
blood) then we associate it with disgust and with horror. The abject can turn us inside out, as
well as outside in. In this regard, the need for constructing stable boundaries persists.

17
Why is it that we fear the improper and unclean so much? Or rather, why do we fear the notion
of a “disrupted self”? As Kristeva (1982:45) mentions: “at the crossroads of phobia, obsession,
and perversion, abjection describes those processes and practices which re-establish subjective
integrity in response to a real or imagined transgression”. Furthermore, Kristeva also stipulates
that the phobic object is in fact simply a hallucination of noting. These ideas allude to the
possibility that the fear we have merely exposes the already existing instability of our object
relation. What threatens from the outside therefore only threaten insofar as it is already within.
Perhaps in the same way as in which Kristeva thinks we are strangers to ourselves, we are also
horrors to ourselves.

Connected to the notion of fear, the abject is also indicative of a repulsion, the labelling of the
other as not only something to fear, but as something which we ought to fear- something
disgusting. Sara Ahmed (2000:83) notes that disgust is not simply an inner psychic state, but
rather that it operates on the workings of the body. Secondly, Ahmed observes that disgust is
always directed at an object and therefore involves the relationship between bodies and objects.
Like the process of abjection, disgust manifests itself in a distancing act from an object and can
therefore be characterized as a form of rejection.

Hence Ahmed (2000:86) concludes that to be disgusted is to be affected by what one has
rejected. Ahmed (2000:86) also argues that disgust shows us how the boundaries that allow
the distinction between subjects and objects are undone in the moment of their making. This
speaks of the ambiguity related to the notion of disgust. On the one hand, the subject feels the
object to be disgusting and then expels the object, but through expelling the object, the subject
finds it disgusting. Border objects are therefore disgusting, while disgust engenders border
objects. Or, alternatively, through the very act of being disgusted, the subject establishes the
disgusting object.

Furthermore, Ahmed argues that because disgust is an emotion associated with involuntary
bodily reaction, moral disgust is also often experienced as a natural and permissible response.
This is also supported by the type of reasoning that claims: “anybody would find x as repulsive
as I do”. However, what is also significant to note is that that which is perceived and/or

18
imagined to be messy/filthy relates with fundamental belief systems, and as such also involves
community-wide complicity. In this regard, disgust reactions are always contingent and
relational. According to Ahmed, it reveals less about the disgusted individual, or the thing
deemed disgusting, than about the culture in which disgust is experienced and performed. In
other words, there can be no disgust without an already existing consensus on what should be
deemed disguising. Only when disgust is approached as something that is symptomatic of
wider social relations of power, will it be possible to determine why disgust is attributed to
particular bodies. Ahmed also argues that this process always operates discursively, and that
images and signs of disgust become familiar through the repetition thereof. What is most
important to acknowledge is therefore that disgust is not innocent, but always political.

When a person and their bodily appearance are designated as disgusting, they are transformed
into a ‘magnet of fascination and repulsion’, and become subject to forms of dehumanizing
violence which are lived and which can be immobilizing in their effects (Kristeva 1995: 118).
This reminds one of the violent images of xenophobia, where without a change to speak, the
foreigner is chased out with force, demolishing even the slightest change he had to belong. The
otherness of the foreigner and the notion of the stranger that lives within, are thus connected to
both the abject and the process of abjection. Following Kristeva’s theories, the foreigner is
labelled as abject and is abjected insofar as it disturbs the sense of self of the nation. This
disturbance is horrific and causes the nation to view the foreigner with a sense of fear and
disgust, prompting the need to secure its borders. However, the nation abjects the foreigner,
not because it is intrinsically foreign, but rather because it reminds the nation of the foreignness
which is already within itself.

THE ABJECT STRANGER: EMBODIMENT AND A RENEWED BODY POLITIC

In the previous sections of my paper, I provided an exposition of both Strangers to Ourselves
and Powers of Horror to show how Kristeva’s ideas regarding alterity developed. Even though
her abject theory is in many ways guilty of the same accusations as her account of the stranger,
I believe that what lacks in the latter can in some way be supplemented by some of her
contributions regarding the abject. Meaning, there is a possibility that the notion of the abject
provides fruitful possibilities in terms of addressing the problems regarding an a-historic,

19
individualized and psychologized understanding of the stranger, specifically with regards to
the prospect of social reform. By reconstructing and reconciling Kristeva’s theories, I want to
put forth a conceptualization of embodied otherness as a possible means of imagining a
renewed body politic to counter the current crisis surrounding national identity.

Reconstructing and reconciling Kristeva

In both of her accounts, it seems to be the case that Kristeva’s emphasis on a psychoanalytic
model tends to inadequately focus on lived social processes as abjection and uncanny
strangeness both revolve largely around inner psychic processes. As Tyler (2013) notes,
Kristeva’s theorisation is very compelling on an explanatory level, but the process of what it
means to be made abject is absent from her writings. For this reason, Tyler develops the concept
of social abjection to better consider states of exclusion from multiple perspectives. Many of
the problematic aspects surrounding Kristeva’s theorisation of the foreigner can thus be
resolved by means of relating the process of social abjection to the subject formation of the
stranger. Therefore, before it is possible to theoretically reconcile Kristeva’s theories of
otherness, it is equally necessary to reconstruct her. To do this, I will draw strongly on post-
colonial feminist appraisals of Kristeva, especially as discussed by Tyler.

Tyler (2013) argues that Kristeva’s theory of abjection depends on an unqualified opposition
between the universality of the psychoanalytic subject and the particularity of the body politic
in question. For her, this opposition can be problematised insofar as everyone is always
particularised to some extent. Furthermore, Tyler thinks that Kristeva’s account of xenophobia
also reflects the problems that result of an application of a prehistorical theory of abjection to
the demanding social and political troubles of our own time. The reasons why some are
abjected, are not attached only to the unconscious sot the prehistory of the subject but rather,
they are an effect of material histories: in this case France’s colonial past. Tyler therefore
argues that it is not psychoanalysis which is needed to relieve the ‘defensive hatreds of
nationalism’ as Kristeva suggests, but rather an understanding of the violent history which gave
rise to it.

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According to Tyler, psychoanalysis is a distinctly Eurocentric theory that developed in the
larger cultural milieu of colonialism and imperialism. Tyler (2013:56) argues that to an extent,
Kristeva’s use of psychoanalysis creates a theoretical opportunity for “‘actively forgetting’ the
colonial histories which violently re-emerge within contemporary expressions of xenophobia
against both black citizens and newly arrived migrants”. In other words, Tyler believes that
while Kristeva’s initial impetus in her writing on foreigners is to promote an alternate politics
of cosmopolitan hospitality, what she provides is a psychological justification for ‘sanitary’
forms of nationalism. Tyler takes this point further by noting that abjection in her account
“enacts an epistemic violence which is complicit with the Republic’s larger ‘collective
amnesia’ about the violence of its imperial past”. While this reading of Kristeva is rather harsh,
it is possible that her theory results in the dismembering of historic remembrances as well as
lived experiences of racialized violence within the body politic.

In reaction to this implication of Kristeva’s theory, Spivak claimed within an interview that
even though she does not completely discard abjection as an expounding concept, she insists
on understanding it as a theory of European origin which merely replicates the imperial axis of
European subjectivity. Tyler thus aims to turn Kriseva’s account of abjection against itself in
order to develop an account of social abjection that is historically grounded. Such an
understanding of abjection will allow for a theoretical and empirical focus on the issues like
xenophobia, racism and nationalism which Kristeva’s psychoanalytic account apparently
engages with, but mystifies instead.

Kristeva’s conceptual paradigm can therefore be twisted for distinctly political and critical
purposes. The politicisation of abjection is twofold. On the one hand, it involves the
historicising of abjection. Such an account would refuse the psychoanalytic account of
abjection as a sole prehistorical formation of the subject. On the other hand, it also demands
for a collective understanding of those who are made abject to be recognised in the political
milieu of the time. For this reason, it is needed to consider the physical effects of being made
abject within certain historical, social and political backdrops. From this point of view, abject
peoples can be understood according to Tyler (2013) as “those whom industrial imperialism

21
rejects but cannot do without” namely slaves, prostitutes, the colonized, domestic workers, the
insane and the unemployed.

Furthermore, this reconstruction of abjection also allows for distinctions to be made between
different forms of abjects. Tyler notes that one can distinguish between for example: abject
objects; states; zones; agents of abjection; socially abjected groups; psychic processes of
abjection and political processes of abjection. In this way, one can also understand that for
example an abject object like menstrual blood is different from a socially abjected group like,
for examples lesbians or transgender people. One can also understand how a psychic process
of abjection such as disavowal or the uncanny is different from a political process of abjection
like ethnic genocide. These are distinct dimensions, but also interdependent, elements of
abjection. They are not trans-historical and universal but, rather, are interrelated and, in some
instances, contradictory elements of a complex process of psychic and social formation.

Tyler concludes her argument in favour of social abjection by noting that “if the abject is a
spatializing politics of disgust, which functions to create forms of distance between the body
politic proper and those excluded from the body of the state (and forced to live in internal
border zones), then the politics of the abject is a counter-spatial politics which attempts to
reclaim the spaces and zones of abjection as radical sites of revolt” That is, by means of an
empirical focus on the lives of those who are labelled as abject one can reflect the different
forms of political agency that are available to those who are subjugated within continuous and
systematic manifestations of power. The conception of social abject therefore also holds the
possibility of extending the idea of the foreigner that lives within to the discourse of the national
unconscious and collective belonging, as it was historically developed.

Embodied Otherness
With the inclusion of social abjection within our understanding of the foreigner as other, we
are also able to locate otherness within the body. This reconstruction of our understanding of
the stranger therefore largely revolves an embodied account of otherness. Before I proceed to
speak of the embodied other, it is perhaps needed to elaborate on the embodied self and the
importance of the body within the post-colony. Particularly in feminist theory, there is a

22
concern with re-evaluating the body in an attempt to undermine the Cartesian mind/body
dualism which privileges the masculine Western discourse. This project resulted in an
acknowledgement that bodies are not simply given, but rather, they are differentiated in a way
which makes it impossible for identity and subjectivity to be separated from forms of
embodiment.

In Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality she questions and
challenges some psychoanalytical and feminist approaches to embodiment by thinking through
the function of cultural difference and social antagonism in marking out the boundaries of
bodies. In her introduction, she warns against the presupposition related to an ontology of
otherness. For her, the very naming of the stranger reproduces the notion that there exists
something as a stranger. It is thus the very process of expelling or welcoming the stranger
which produces the figure of the stranger in the first place. In this way, she also problematizes
Kristeva’s notion of the stranger that lives within as part of a universalisation of otherness.
Ahmed (2000:6) argues that to conclude simply that we are all strangers to ourselves is to avoid
dealing with the political processes whereby some others are designated as stranger than others.
We can also apply this to the case of the abject stranger and say that some are abjected more
than others.

Ahmed therefore aims to understand how identity is established through strange encounters
without (re)producing a universe of strangers. For Ahmed (2000:40), bodies materialise in a
complex set of temporal and special relations to other bodies, including bodies that are
recognised as familiar and bodies that are strange. Ahmed continues to ask how strange
encounters manifests on the body of the stranger. She notes that through strange encounters,
bodies are de-formed and re-formed in a way that they take form through and against other
bodily forms (Ahmed, 2000:39). Ahmed (2000:42) also questions how bodies become marked
by these differences. More precisely: “How do bodies come to be lived through being
differentiated from other bodies, whereby the differences in other bodies make a difference to
such a lived embodiment?”. In this regard, it is important to note that the body politic is
constructed on a particular kind of human body. What can be called the unmarked body (white,
male, heterosexual) appears to be enclosed and separate. This can be considered as the body

23
that is at-home or in-place. More so, any body that is different to this becomes excluded from
the body politic. The formation included within the unmarked bodies therefore also has an
intimate connection with social space.

In response to this, Ahmed (2000:44) proposes that difference is not merely found in the body,
but is established in relation between bodies. Similarly, to the way in which the abject
destabilises the borders between inside and outside, different bodies come to be lived through
the formation of boundaries and lines between the inside and the outside and as such, the
differentiation between bodies involve categorizing some as familiar and some as strange. To
avoid this, Ahmed (2000:44) suggests that we think through the skin, rather than the body when
it comes to strange encounters.

The skin can also be understood as a border which contains the inside of the subject from within
and the other from outside. But, the skin can also be viewed as an exposure to the other. As
Ahmed profoundly notes, “for if the skin is a border, it is a border that feels”. In this way, the
skin is paradoxically and ambiguously involving not only containment, but also an opening out
of bodies to other bodies. The skin is therefore tasked with protecting the self from the others,
but also at the same time, to prevent the inside from becoming outside and the self from
becoming other. This idea allows one to envision the relationship between the individual body
and the body-politic. The final section of this paper aims to further investigate this relationship
between the body and the body-politic as a means of making sense of embodied body politics
as a counter to the crisis of national identity.

Leaky Bodies, Leaky Nations

Originally, the concept of body politic was developed as a metaphor that regards the nation as
a corporeal entity likened to the human body. This analogy also typically included a reference
to the Sovereign or head of government as the head which leads the body of people or the
nation. This view of the body strongly relates to what Margaret Shildrick (1997:13) refers to
as the biomedical body. It could also be argued that this model relates to the Cartesian
understanding of the bod where there is a split between mind and body whereby the subject is
disembodied and detached from corporeal raw material. It can therefore be argued that the body

24
politic was largely based on the masculine and Western notion of the body proper which relies
on the maintenance of fixed boundaries. By implication, this conceptualisation of the nation
contributes to the construction of national identity which allows for the abjection of that which
threatens it even in the slightest.

As part of my attempt to theorise a renewed understanding of the stranger as an other, I want

to suggest that the feminist model of embodiment provides a more constructive model for the
body politic- an embodied body politic as such. What would such a model of the body entail?
Shildrick (1997:16) explains that in contrast to the masculine body proper, the female sex
stands in a different relationship to embodiment. By this, Shildrick refers to the putative
leakiness by which the outflow of the body ruptures the boundaries of the proper, threatening
the distinctions between inside/outside; mind/body and inner/outer. Indeed, the embodied body
politics offers the possibility of fluid boundaries. In this sense, it can be argued that the female
model, which proposes a leaky body as the standard for subjective understanding, completely
eliminates the need for a bordered, fixed sense of self.

Foreseeably, one might counter the concept of a leaky nation by considering the possibility that
such a model of flows could easily allow for threatening others to enter within harmful ways.
Perhaps Kearney’s idea about a hermeneutic of otherness capable of informed, ethico-political
judgement can be useful in this sense. Kearney (2002: 10) argues that besides the
psychoanalytic model, we also need a hermeneutic of otherness which allows us to discern
between different types of others. For Kearney, there is a difference between the Other and the
alien where the latter possibly poses a real threat and the former a constructed one. He therefore
argues that it is not sufficient to be open to the other beyond us, within us, or historically
scapegoated by us. Rather, what is also needed, is the ability to discern, even if only
provisionally, between different kinds of others.

In other words, this female model of the body could perhaps provide the perfect locus for
Kearney’s hermeneutic of discernment to situate itself. This also coincides with Ahmed’s
discussion on the skin that feels. Instead of only focusing on the skin as always exposed and
touchable, we can also think how different ways of touching allow for different configurations

25
of bodily and social space. When this model is utilized as a metaphor for the body politic, it
allows us to similarly envision a leaky nation which allows, at worst, for discernment rather
than abjection.

Within such a body politic, we are enabled to differentiate between “the body” and “my body”.
Ahmed argues that the emphasis on the particular body relates to the body as lived. Whereas
the traditional model of the body was universalist in nature, the lived body allows us to refer
to our bodies and our subjectivities within the way in which it was particularly constructed.
However, she goes further to say that we also need an understanding of embodiment as lived
experience that moves beyond the privatised realm of my body. What is therefore needed is a
theory of inter-embodiment that describes the social experience of dwelling with other bodies.
In this way, instead of speaking of ‘the body’ or ‘my body’ we can begin to theorise ‘our body’.
‘Our body’ would then relate to a conception of sociality that becomes the fleshy form of many
bodily forms. In other words, ‘our body’ speaks of a leaky nation in which we have “bodies
opening up into a fleshy world of other bodies”.

CONCLUSION
To conclude, I will briefly summarise what have been argued thus far and thereafter I will
provide some final considerations on what is at stake for the other when an embodied body
politic is imagined. This essay was introduced with Kristeva’s idea that recognising that we are
all “strangers to ourselves” entails the possibility of overcoming the inner xenophobic drive
which causes one to reject strangers, foreigners or aliens. However, it was argued that despite
the initial attraction to this understanding of otherness, Kristeva’s theory lacks within its ability
to translate to any concrete social reform against xenophobic violence. For this reason, there
was an inquisitive return to one of Kristeva’s earlier works on abjection with the possibility in
mind of extending her theorisation of the foreigner. Through this exploration, it was observed
that the notion of the abject is beneficial for understanding acts of bordering as well as the
horror and fear that is connected to anything ‘other’. Kristeva’s focus was almost exclusively
on the internal or psychological workings of the process of abjection, rather than providing any
explanation for why certain things or people are abjected more than others.

26
It is due to this, that I attempted to reconstruct and reconcile Kristeva’s notion of the stranger
and the abject to make sense of the stranger, the foreigner and the alien as a socially embodied
other. This was done with the theoretical guidance of Tyler’s concept of social abjection,
Ahmed’s understanding of embodied otherness and Kearney’s call for a hermeneutic of
otherness capable of discernment. In short, it was argued that the concept of (social) abjection
allows one to situate the reasons why some or abjected more than other within the lived
experiences of the body. As such, Kristeva’s writing can be read towards a renewed
understanding of otherness as embodied otherness. Finally, then, I argued that the model of the
nation which gave rise to the crisis of national identity, is derived from the Cartesian, masculine
body- or rather, the disembodied body. In order to counter this crisis, I proposed that a feminist
interpretation of the body as a body of flows could serve as a more hospitable model for the
nation (or rather community of nations). This nation is not a borderless nation, but rather a
nation with a border that feels. To this extent, the notion of strangers, foreigners, or others are
not eliminated, but rather, it serves as an opportunity for better ways of being with others.

What remains now, is to ask what this border that feels would look like within the current
socio-political climate? In order to reflect on this, I will first focus on the significance of the
“border” as such. Perhaps it can be said that it is important to recognise strangers, whether it
be the stranger within the self or outside of the collective. Such a recognition allows one not
only to acknowledge the already existing world of others, but also to question why certain
people remain more other than others. Furthermore, a border that feels, remind us that acts of
bordering remain to a large extent fundamental within the pre-reflected and pre-historic
constitution of the self. In this sense, the problem is not that we have borders, but rather that
we close our borders. For this reason, it is still reasonable to be careful or cautious when it
comes to the opening of one’s borders towards others. The border that feels allows for the
possibility of discerning between the other and the alien without the need for hostility or
violence. This refers to what Kearney calls “an invitation to judge more judiciously so that we
may judge more justly”.

This brings me to reflect on what it means for a border to “feel”. If one takes seriously the
feminist model of the embodied body politic, then one must also account for the hosting

27
possibilities that the female body can offer. This refers to a body capable of housing the other-
or even acting as a surrogate for the other. Similarly, then, foreign policy should allow for the
temporary possibility of housing others or at the very least for reflecting on what it means to
be a host. Perhaps what is needed within policy is the simple acknowledgement that even
though every body is not physically capable of housing/hosting the other, everybody was
birthed as a result of a hospitable other. Perhaps the nation is a collection of others just as much
as it can be a collection of hosts. In this sense, I do believe that social reform is possible when
we understand that a border that feels is also a reciprocal border insofar as it allows for the
understanding that radical otherness could also provide new possibilities of understanding and
maintaining the self.

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Kearney, R., 2002. Strangers and Others: From Deconstruction to Hermeneutics. Critical
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Kristeva, J., 1982. Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Kristeva, J., 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. New York : Columbia University Press .
Shildrick, M., 1997. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Post-Modernism and Bio-
Ethics. New York : Routledge .
Tyler, I., 2013. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain.
New York : Zed Books.
UNHCR, 2017. UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency. [Online]
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Wodak, R., 2009. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh:
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Ziarek, E., 1995. The Uncanny Style of Kristeva's Critique of Nationalism. Postmodern
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