ABSTRACT
Foreignness as a philosophical concept and as a lived experience has preoccupied the author for a long time, along with issues of legality and illegality. One can be a palatable supplemental foreigner (grateful, domesticated, with a 'cute' accent, and profiting from xenophilic tendencies), or a dangerous foreigner (a thief of 'our' national goods or, worse, a terrorist); foreignness is always overdetermined. This point returns the author to the Derridean pharmakon and thus to the way foreignness is simultaneously about being both remedy and poison. This chapter considers several contemporary films that reveal figurations of foreignness in the US and Western Europe, two areas that have historically experienced the influx of people arriving from various elsewheres. It would be easy to claim that the host nation and its citizens profit from the foreigner's usability and disposability in various ways. Yet, foreigners also profit from the usability of other foreigners, thus complicating the realm of both politics and ethics.
