Reaching Out to the Other in the Nation

In Nations without Nationalism Kristeva describes the nation of the future as polyphonic, flexible and heterogeneous. In the past, she argues, nations have formed their identity on the basis of exclusion but in the modern world, with its shifting populations and global economy, the modern nation can no longer afford to be homogeneous. The demands of immigration necessitate that nation-states be flexible, polyphonic and welcoming of strangers, that they become what she terms: ‘The nation as a series of differences’ (Kristeva, 1993, 41). How will this heterogeneity be achieved? According to Kristeva, it will be achieved by learning to embrace the other. In Strangers to Ourselves (1991) she argues that all identity, whether individual or national, is formed on the basis of exclusion. To overcome this exclusion of the other, we must learn to live with others without erasing their difference or ostracizing them. Kristeva’s notion of embracing the other was first developed in her essay ‘Stabat Mater’ (1974), in the context of maternity. Prompted by her own experience of maternity, Kristeva sees pregnancy as providing the basis for a new ethics based on community rather than the individual since in her view maternity breaks down the boundaries between self and other. ‘The child’s arrival,’ she argues, ‘extracts woman out of her oneness and gives her the possibility […] of reaching out to the other, the ethical’ (Kristeva, 1997, 382). Kristeva calls this new ethic ‘herethics’ and describes it as an ethic of loving attentiveness to the other which operates outside the Law of the Father and is therefore something women are peculiarly equipped to do. Kristeva elaborates on this ethic in a moving passage in ‘Women’s Time’ (1979):

More recently, in the conclusion to the third volume of Le génie féminin, Kristeva has reiterated this notion of maternity as a time of reaching out to the other, linking it now with the Christian notion of agape which has featured so prominently in her work:

Herethics for Kristeva is a relational, dialogic practice of love in which recognition of alterity takes precedence over personal identity. In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva applies this psychoanalytic insight to politics, drawing on Freud’s notion of the Uncanny, that is, the uncanny sensations we experience in relation to certain objects or people stemming from the unconscious projection of our desires and anxieties onto the world around us.2 So Kristeva argues that it is our own unconscious that is projected onto those whom we exclude from the nation: ‘The foreigner is within us. And when we flee from or struggle against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious’ (Kristeva, 1991, 191). She suggests that the way to overcome exclusion of the other is to first learn to embrace the other (strangeness, monstrosity) within ourselves for, by accepting the other in ourselves, our own radical strangeness, we will accept the other in the nation: ‘The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities’ (Kristeva, 1991, 1). When we become aware of how our values and beliefs do not entirely fit in with the national ethos – and whose ever do? – we will then become more tolerant of other outsiders in the nation and begin to work towards a more flexible national identity, ‘promoting the togetherness of those foreigners that we all recognize ourselves to be’ (Kristeva, 1991, 3). She repeats this insight in Revolt, She Said: ‘[...] by recognizing this strangeness intrinsic to each of us, we have more opportunities to tolerate the foreignness of others. And subsequently more opportunities to try to create less monolithic, more polyphonic communities’ (Kristeva, 2002c, 64). In Nations without Nationalism, Kristeva sees women as particularly equipped to negotiate the passage between self and the other, between the known and the strange, since they are frequently positioned as strangers and exiles within the public life of the nation. Just as, for Kristeva, women are never entirely at home in the symbolic order, so they are never entirely at home in the nation: because of their marginality in relation to power and discourse, women remain skeptical and

ironic vis-à-vis the social order. In ‘What of Tomorrow’s Nation?’ she argues that their marginality puts a special responsibility on women to welcome strangers into the nation:

In the light of Irish women’s often marginal position in the nation, it seems appropriate to investigate Kristeva’s view that women, because of their boundary position within the nation, are especially skilled in mediating between the self and the other, in the context of some twentieth-century fiction by Irish women.