ABSTRACT
Having become a commonplace in educational rhetoric over the last decade, interculturality is seen as a tool for bridging cultural differences and breaking out of the nihilistic tendencies of multiculturalism's enclosure of subjects within partitioned cultures. Presented with a convoluted double bind, the implied reader of the text is urged to try to exchange cultures with an Other whose ways of thinking, behaving and feeling are so distinctively different that the communicative act in itself is at risk: culture cannot be exchanged, culture must be exchanged. As a consequence, the double bind returns to present itself: at the same time as the act of crossing cultural borders is valorised and encouraged in the name of solidarity and dialogue, borders are instituted in the process of relating to a perceived Other in opposition to a same. Thus, in attempting to bridge cultural differences, interculturality at the same time, in contradictory fashion, risks sustaining the unity of national identities.
