Abstract
The aim of the paper is to outline a specific conception of foreignness that can be reconstructed from the work of Julia Kristeva across the themes she addresses. First of all, I identify two main strategies through which the problem of foreignness can be approached.
The first strategy understands foreignness as a relational concept and considers it primarily within the dialectic of the same and the other. Within this strategy, the same and the other are treated as two aspects of a single phenomenon, which are intertwined and refer to each other.
I contrast this type of thinking with a strategy that understands foreignness as an element that problematizes this relationality. Here, foreignness stands beyond the dialectical relation and has to do with, for example, notions of event or singularity.
Different moments of Kristeva's thinking resemble both of these strategies. I will show that the elements of the first strategy are present particularly where Kristeva thematizes foreignness explicitly and links it to an ethical perspective (especially Étrangers a nous-mêmes).
Elements of the second strategy, then, appear mainly in Kristeva's earlier works, where she articulates the concepts of the semiotic and the abject. However, insofar as I speak of the 'presence of elements', I suggest that the two tendencies we can identify in Kristeva's work are not reducible to either the first or the second strategy.
I will therefore present such a reading of Kristeva's work, where foreignness is considered as a problematization of relationality, but can still be understood in its ethical aspect. My intention is thus to articulate a specifically Kristevan conception of foreignness that lies at the intersection between her work in the field of semiotics and political and social philosophy.
I will also attempt to provide answers to the following questions: what, in Kristevan perspective, is the foreign; how is the foreign constituted; and what is the position of this concept of foreignness in regard to the dialectics of the same and the other I mentioned above? Last but not least, I will try to outline how the introduced conception can intervene in the current academic debate related to the notion of the foreign.