ABSTRACT
How do you know the difference between a friend and a stranger? How do you know a stranger? Such questions challenge the assumption that the stranger is the one who is precisely not the object of knowledge. For in such a question, knowledge is staged as constitutive, not only of what is familiar, what is already known or indeed knowable, but also of what is strange, and who is the stranger. As I argued in the previous two chapters, the stranger is not any-body that we have failed to recognise, but some-body that we have already recognised as a stranger, as ‘a body out of place’. Hence, the stranger is some-body we know as not knowing, rather than some-body we simply do not know. The stranger is produced as a category within knowledge, rather than coming into being in an absence of knowledge. The implications of such a rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and strangers are far reaching: it suggests that knowledge is bound up with the formation of a community, that is, with the formation of a ‘we’ that knows through (rather than against) ‘the stranger’.
