ABSTRACT
It has been well documented that the idea of the stranger can be traced back to a short essay written by the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel. It has been more than a century since Simmel wrote the paper, and its significance has not diminished; scholars continue to draw on the essay, as evidenced by its citations. Part of this literature concerns itself with the extent to which Simmel’s category relates to other concepts, whereas other studies – as Chapter 2 demonstrated – investigate whether Simmel’s stranger can still describe the experience of cultural and religious Others in a global, mobile and ‘super-diverse’ world where cross-cultural contacts are more frequent and intense. In these latter works, the heuristic value of Simmel’s category has now been questioned. This rich literature, however, confines itself to Simmel’s essay on the stranger and rarely contextualises the stranger within his broader intellectual project: especially, his critique of binary thinking; his observations on the construction of historical knowledge; and his romantic conception of individuality evident in his comments on the genius and the cosmopolitan subject. Contextualisation along these lines provides a more expansive, deeper and multiple understanding of the Simmelian stranger. The final part of this chapter will demonstrate how Simmel’s insights on these matters can provide a unique contribution to the sociology of knowledge and, more specifically, to rethinking the debate surrounding standpoint epistemologies. Contrary to the claims that the ‘classical stranger’ has become archaic, I argue that what constitutes the ‘classical stranger’ needs to be rethought and that what we find in Simmel is multiple readings of the ‘classical stranger’ that still resonate with contemporary debates in social theory.
