The Stranger's Case

Brian Castro on Julia Kristeva

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Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed.
What had you got? I'll tell you. You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled—and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man;
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With selfsame hand, self reasons and self right
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another...you'll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in liom
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th'offender mourn)
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you—whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German prince, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them—what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers' case,
And this your mountainish inhumanity. ① Anthony Munday, et al. Sir Thomas More, 2.4.72-87; 118-139.

This is a speech by Sir Thomas More in the play of that name which is attributed to Anthony Munday, but after analysis of the handwriting during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was deemed a work of multiple authors, there being at least six writers of the work. William Shakespeare was identified as being the author of three of the pages, from which this speech emerges. As George Steiner remarked of Elizabethan theatre, “the conception of workmanship, of formal production, was professional and non-egotistical to a degree we find difficult to experience.” ② George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (Yale University Press, 2001) 219. But whether this play is by a single author or not, the point is that this particular speech was very much part of Shakespeare’s style of universal declaration which masks subversion beneath linguistic virtuosity.

Ostensibly Thomas More is addressing the crowd in order to stem its violence against foreigners, but if the stranger is alluded to, it is as a missing presence. One could formulate this absence in terms of a Shakespearean theatrical technique known as an apostrophe – an address to a missing entity (Hamlet’s father or Yorrick, for example) – which is here detectable as a double apostrophe. This is not an address to an imaginary listener overheard by real listeners as Hamlet may have practised, but this is an address to an imaginary crowd in which the absent entity of the stranger bears no familiarity, no aura, no friendship. The apostrophic turn is therefore twice effected, in that it is unreachable through empathy.

Perhaps the case can be made clearer by using the word “apostrophe” in its orthographic or diacritical sense. An apostrophe stands in place for a missing letter or letters. It can also indicate possession. So it is either a signifier of absence or of ownership, but it cannot be both at the same time. The stranger is an apostrophised Other who not only is not addressed, but whose very absence haunts and “owns” a subtext rife with discomfort. It is easy to dehumanise, but difficult to allow “real” subjects to speak with the same amount of familial and rhetorical authority.

For the foreigner or stranger though, it is entirely different. They want to be heard, to practise a language, directing speech outward in order to be empowered with a subtext and with an imaginary audience. In other words: “No one is listening to me, so I will perform my speech to mark my presence even though it is futile and may only ever be something that provides me with a virtual future, a utopian dream of owning my status.” I want to tease out this very case of the stranger as absence; as someone not even addressed and who needs to struggle into existence, afloat in a vast sea of hostile reception and unfamiliar rhetoric.

A refugee does not have ownership: of language, rights and property. They only have absences. To be spoken for and not to speak. It is paradoxical and uncomfortable to own what is missing, yet harbouring a lost object is principally the condition of melancholia.

Returning to Thomas More’s speech, the high rhetoric of his soliloquy implies that there is an aristocratic miscreancy cloaking the crowd. If one focuses on the pronoun “you”, it becomes clear that the speech is not directed to an uncomprehending, brutal and violent crowd, but toward an unmentioned, but intelligent correlate sitting in the audience. In defence of this speech, it must be noticed that it is subversive, that censorship is in place, and that there is a risky critique of the law.

And that you sit as kings in your desires, 
Authority quite silenced by your brawl,
And you in ruff italics author's own. of your opinions clothed.

In More’s speech the implication that the aristocracy should bear the blame for this treatment of strangers cannot be made very clear. A creative repression is enacted which turns an audience-address into a soliloquy, compressing dynamism and drama within a literary trope rather than unleashing it in literal accusation. The “you” is an accusation, not against the crowd, but against the king; not against ruffians, but against their leadership. No more obvious level of meaning could have been expressed, for fear of censorship and retribution. Indeed, in the wake of the 1592-3 riots in London against immigrants, the play Sir Thomas More was censored by Edmund Tylney, who had the title of Master of the Revels, the duty of this office being to examine and approve all plays for performance before they could be staged. In the process of censorship, the word “foreigners” was changed to “Lombards” because there were few Lombards living in London. Again, the “stranger” had become a displaced entity, even in his or her particularity, in order not to encourage activism. It was indeed, a time when it was a crime to speak. The Tudors were still in power and Rome was still the foreign enemy. Thus, at this stage, one could say the case of the stranger was a triple apostrophe: in terms of religion, statehood and existential presence. Under Elizabeth the First, it was the beginning of the era of “national identity”. As Anne Cheng said about the movie Flower Drum Song, national identity for the foreigner “is an identity that is legislated through loss.” ③ Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford University Press, 2001), 44. Yet Shakespeare will come to write, some years later, the “foreign” voices of Shylock and Othello, albeit represented ambiguously and controversially, depending on which speaking position was being taken: one of xenophobia or one of xenotropism. There was and is always, in the rhetoric of nations, a desire for the consummation of opposites: of pity and enmity; attraction and fear. There is also a strong sexual desire for opposites… and a corresponding emasculation of the subaltern.

But let us listen more closely. The stranger does speak, does babble in literature; a barbarian in the best sense of the word: etymologically, one whose language denotes a different mode of speech, an interpreter, translator and foreigner. The stranger is very much present but without an identifiable voice, addressed as an apostrophe and without legal status. Yet they incorporate in effect, the bare but sacred life that is set apart, both hallowed and cursed. Their voice is a melancholic semblance, a haunting refrain throughout all the world’s literatures in the form of the outsider, the Döppelganger, the Ausländer, the ghost. There is an agency here, and it can be both playfully and gainfully employed, adopting semblances as Hamlet does, masking and making riddles and conundrums. Indeed, nothing is more intriguing than the outcast who turns court-jester, whose lèse-majesté is often tolerated without incurring execution.

Slavoj Žižek points out that: “[t]he melancholic's refusal to accomplish the work of mourning [...] takes the form of its very opposite, a faked spectacle of the excessive, superfluous mourning for an object even before this object is lost.” ④ Slavoj Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act,” Critical Inquiry 26:4, (Summer 2000), 661. It is possible to take this spectacle-faking to be a kind of melancholia that is adopted by foreigners. In a way, the stranger or foreigner impersonates mourning for a loss which didn't occur in the past (because no one cares or is even listening), but for a future loss, a wastage which may or may not bear fruit; a possible completion of mourning from which one can productively move forward from nostalgia. This risk, this Pascalian wager, this Kafkaesque investment in negativity and non-arrival, nevertheless lives in hope. It establishes being through performance and through a pilgrimage to a promised land elsewhere. Migrant melancholy has always looked to the future as an opportunity to complete the mourning of the past; a future-invention, as distinguished from nostalgia, in which there is only a past that is continuously lost. This kind of melancholy has hope and its process involves semblance. “Hopes could be dashed, but at least I would have sacrificed myself for my children or for a voice; a speaking position.” The foreigner must believe in a fiction, even if it seems contradictory. Fiction complements an agency; an imaginative complaint as a form of aesthetic resistance. This agency has a particular temporality – it operates in another time zone which is not nostalgic, but is directed at the future. “Let me not mourn the future if you hear me now.” It is a performative fictionality which is calibrated by a sliding scale of identification (what Lisa Lowe calls the “partly-invented” ⑤ Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian-American Difference,” Diaspora 1, no.1, (Spring 1991): 24-44. with both the paralysis of the present and the healthy agency of inventing a genealogy in which the problematic strangers’ case is finally laid to rest. While this may seem utopian, scholarship, for the most part, has ignored the positivities of the art of melancholia by either romanticising it or gendering it to critique the dominance of the male melancholic.

Five hundred years after Sir Thomas More was written, Julia Kristeva, in Contre la dépression nationale, argued that France was suffering from a national depression, possessing no self-esteem after the defeat of World War II. She made the point that France could only recover its national confidence if the country opened itself up to the foreigner and the immigrant in a gesture of hospitality rather than hostility. Her book comes in the wake of France’s Muslim immigration, a topic which incurred, and still incurs, numerous debates over assimilation and secularism. Kristeva has come under considerable criticism, most notably from Peter Gratton, for her diagnosis of a national depression which does not take into account France’s colonial past. According to Gratton, it is the loss of France’s colonies which triggered this postcolonial melancholia, and the inability to come to terms with this loss is the source of its national depression. ⑥ Peter Gratton, “What are Psychoanalysts for in a Destitute Time? Kristeva and the Community in Revolt,” Journal For Cultural Research 11, no.1 (January 2007): 1-13. This makes Kristeva’s use of the word “we” (in solidarity with foreigners), problematic, when it sits squarely alongside her employment of the word “nation” as also a “we”, which presumes a cosmopolitan society of un-split subjects. As Birgit Schippers wrote:

Because Kristeva tends to anchor the French nation in the genealogy of the (French) Enlightenment, it is perhaps unsurprising that she has been accused of proffering a conception of the nation and of cosmopolitanism that is profoundly French, even chauvinistic, and that is void of any political-historical analysis. ⑦ Birgit Schipper, Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 159-160.

In an earlier book, Strangers To Ourselves, Kristeva writes that we have to find the foreigner in ourselves, ⑧ Julia Kristeva, Strangers To Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1991), 192. something Freud had suggested in the form of detecting strangeness in ourselves. Freud identifies the uncanny as a fear of something that is not homely or familiar. In his essay he makes an important connection with the idea of the “double”:

The idea of the “double” does not necessarily disappear with the passing of the primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of development of the ego. A special faculty is slowly formed there, able to oppose the rest of the ego, with the function of observing and criticizing the self and exercising a censorship within the mind, and this we become aware of as our “conscience.” ⑨ Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”,(1919): 10.

He goes on to say that:

The “double” has become a vision of terror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes. ⑩ Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”,(1919): 10.

This nexus of fear and conscience is precisely what the foreigner, the “unhomely” and “unhoused”, generates in host nations. As a Jew living in Vienna after the German defeat in the First World War, Freud would have been acutely aware of the changing political climate around what constitutes “German-ness”. Julia Kristeva, herself a foreign-born French national, has the benefit of history and hindsight. But again, where is the foreigner? What is the stranger saying? Sam Haigh points out that Kristeva’s solution to the “national depression” ignores the foreign subject:

What is striking, of course, is that the immigrant him- or herself disappears as subject, and instead remains simply a means through which the French subject may be healed. ⑪ Sam Haigh, “Migration and Melancholia: From Kristeva’s ‘Dépression Nationale’ to Pineau’s ‘Maladie de l’Exile’,” French Studies 60, no.2 (2006): 232.

Anne Cheng makes much the same point when she argues that host countries “heal themselves” with republican sentiments through “the nexus of investment and anxiety provoked by […] institutions of discrimination”. ⑫ Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford University Press, 2001), 12. In other words, the migrant subject, the foreigner, is ignored for the purposes of an ambiguous tension in the host nation between guilt and healing, between terror and conscience. But still, the stranger does not speak. Cheng spells this out, identifying the foreign subject, the racialized subject, as those who have been interred, “resuscitated only as serviceable ghosts” in the rhetoric of national reassurance. ⑬ Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford University Press, 2001), 13.

It is instructive at this point to have another look at what Freud said about the lost object and melancholia:

The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes the substitute for the love-investment, with the result that the love relationship, despite the conflict with the loved one, must not be abandoned. This substitution of identification for object-love is a significant mechanism for the narcissistic illnesses. […] It naturally corresponds to the regression of a type of object-choice to original narcissism. Elsewhere we have explained that identification is the preliminary stage of object-choice, and the first way, ambivalent in its manifestation, in which the ego selects an object. It may assimilate this object, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libido development, may do so by eating it. ⑭ Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shuan Whiteside (Penguin, 2005), 209.

One could well say that the melancholic nation “eats” what is missing. This is the melancholy of post-colonial societies, of once dominant cultures. The strangers’ case (note this collective possession in the position of the apostrophe) is therefore the case of the melancholia of those who employ the double apostrophe of speaking for the foreigner in a universalised, rhetorical fashion (its ‘identification’ through history), while preserving the condition of asylum-seeking as quite removed from the original ‘family’ of the nation (assimilative ingestion rather than multicultural indigestion.) One owns, like an empty suitcase, what is missing, and that is uncanny and disturbing, because nothing is risked.

Foreigners, migrants, other races are “useful” in this role. They signify a “splitting” with the nation’s utopian dream of one-ness; of love and hospitality, conscience and welfare. The foreigner, the racialized subject, becomes invisible in this national self-congratulation, yet at the same time they install an anxiety by threatening non-identity. For a country like France, with its colonial past, the return of the Other as a “lost object” is particularly vexing. Kristeva never tackles this directly, but slips between Enlightenment hospitality and a new Europe by appropriating the Other as integral to specifically French ideals, all the time without allowing its voice. As Timothy Brennan comments: “even Kant had been more wary than she of the drift of a good cosmopolitanism into an imperial apologetics.” ⑮ Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard University Press, 1997), 147.

I am simply pointing out that Kristeva reads the strangers' case (I am careful with the apostrophe here to indicate a group possession of a condition, as Kristeva never refers to her own foreignness directly), as that of a paralysing melancholia on the part of the nation and not as a splenetic revolt on the part of migrants as individuals. The latter exist as apostrophes. Similarly, in her book Strangers To Ourselves Kristeva silences the Other by speaking for it. In her chapter “Void Or Baroque Speech” she employs a similar rhetoric as that performed in Sir Thomas More, only this time she addresses the foreigner:

To be of no account to others. No one listens to you, you never have the floor, or else, when you have the courage to seize it, your speech is quickly erased by the more garrulous and fully relaxed talk of the community. Your speech has no past and will have no power over the group: why should one listen to it? You do not have enough status – “no social standing” – to make your speech useful. ⑯ Julia Kristeva, Strangers To Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1991), 12.

While she is writing ironically and rhetorically, Kristeva’s “speech-act”, like Shakespeare’s, apostrophizes the Other (because it isn’t the Other who is listening), who again becomes Anne Cheng’s “serviceable ghost”. Apart from the voicelessness of the stranger, the difference between Sir Thomas More and Strangers To Ourselves is that in post-modernity a unified meaning ascribed to such addresses is no longer possible: for one thing, strangers have voices and multiple perspectives; for another, so do audiences.

It is one thing to critique Munday and Shakespeare et al for their omission or blind spot in overlooking the doubly apostrophised, in not allowing them to speak, but it is another to point out the kind of unwitting narcissism and dehumanisation Cheng alludes to as a melancholic comfort to counterbalancing the encounter with real subjects. Thomas More’s universalisation – indeed, one could say Europeanization – is a rhetorical gesture still practised by nation-states today, where foreigners are spoken for, but are never heard from. For if the foreigner speaks, no one seems to be listening, since they no longer have a real presence, this “realness”, their discrete identities being subsumed into the rhetoric about groups and ethnicities… crocodile tears in the face of the realpolitik of exclusion. In the current era, the nation does not even need to address the perpetrators of hate, as the sheer numbers of asylum-seekers drowning off Lampedusa or Christmas Island dehumanise individuals from whom nothing singular is documented or is authoritatively worthy of note. The point is that rhetoric has subsumed real beings into a universalised “condition” (a “natural” disaster rather than a “national” one), for which the state has already taken account through a lamentational clucking of tongues. No further show of empathy is needed. On the other side of the coin, the same could be said for ethnic studies and intellectual inquiry which have not taken into consideration the paradox that “identity” involves the discomfort of its own discriminatory practices. Real beings, when they speak as foreigners, enact politics and imagination, accusation and division alike. My point is that political activism and artistic imagination can come together in the form of an aesthetic resistance, which, while comprising the negativities of melancholia (narcissistic blind spots, an inability to act), produce the particularities, the individual psychic states, of real subjects speaking. In other words, “migrant” melancholia possesses an artistic agency: it coerces a speaking position by enunciating an experience of loss, but it is not docile and silent.

Majorities do not understand why minorities are always squabbling. It is why dominant groups want to give strangers one voice, without understanding their particular differences. To a large extent, it is necessary to preserve order. Nations and societies need order for their authority and their being. Foreigners, queers, transgenders, all threaten political and social order through unheimlich speech-acts and induce a “primordial chaos” by spurring reflection over what Arnold Gehlen called “the high art of positing ambiguity.” ⑰ Julia Kristeva, Strangers To Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1991), 181. Disorder, loss and cultural complexity are therefore signifiers of a melancholia which threatens societal order. Let us return to Wolf Lepenies and to his important work Melancholy and Society. In his analysis of the work of R.K. Merton, Lepenies notes that:

Taking the standard of order as a unit of measurement, forms of behavior appear as appropriate or inappropriate, depending on whether they promote order or dis-order. Merton’s observation that retreatists live in society (content orientation) but do not belong to it (formal order orientation) is typical of such a stance. Melancholy as a form of the retreatism that Merton describes can thus be understood, in terms of a more dynamic description (which connotes the possibility of role sequences), as a loss of order, and in terms of a static description, as nonorder, nonconformity, dis-order. ⑱ Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines & Doris Jones (Harvard University Press, 1992), 9.

One can discern here, a similarity of symptoms between the melancholic sense of loss amongst nationalists and amongst that of immigrants. Measuring the difference between nostalgic loss and real loss can illuminate how pivotal melancholy is as a catalyst to action, resting on a sliding scale from retreatist ambiguity to political activism.

In a way, ambiguity is Julia Kristeva’s methodology. Her second-person address to the stranger incorporates both empathy and interpretation. It is a “translation” of the foreign, rendering it more amenable and comforting than active and disturbing:

No one points out your mistakes, so as not to hurt your feelings, and then there are so many, and after all they don’t give a damn. One nevertheless lets you know that it is irritating just the same. Occasionally, raising the eye-brows or saying “I beg your pardon?” in quick succession lead you to understand that you will “never be a part of it”, that “it is not worth it,” that there, at least, one is “not taken in.” ⑲ Julia Kristeva, Strangers To Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1991), 15.

The “you” both erases the responsibility for dialectical equity and forms a justification for taking the part of the absent voice. Speaking for the other is what colonizing nations do and have always done. White Australia, for example, has always spoken for its minorities and its Pacific neighbours as a big brother to Indigenous (and so-called “indigent”) populations. Critiquing that serves the same impotency ascribed to the racialised subject: “Who will speak for you if we don’t?” Indeed, Kristeva’s “you” slips between the intradiegetic subject (a narrator existing inside the storyworld of the text), and the actual reader, forming an ambiguity as to whom is exactly being addressed. (There can be a considerable slippage in reader-reception between empathy and indifference, identification and perhaps outright hostility.) Is it a generalised appeal to the reader or an apostrophic self-address inside a fictional universe? Is it an intradiegetic or extradiagetic subject (i.e. a narrator outside the fictional world of a narrated text)? Is it a universalised proposition to the world at large? And who is being represented? Is an answer expected?

It is on all counts, a melancholic stance, as it does not require an answer. It is the phantom space into which the melancholic retreats, assuming and resuming the missing “you”, mistaking it for action. The lost object needs to remain lost in endless reflection. In other words, Thomas More/Julia Kristeva share the same role of the powerless rhetorician: they have no power for historical and social change; no real subject is to be addressed, and it is only their rhetorical impact which is performed in place of real institutional change. (This is the very role the foreigner takes on.) As Richard Poirier pointed out, expression cannot accommodate rapid historical change:

To be liberated from silence and recognized as familiar, to emerge from anonymity into merely an accommodated version of it, which is role-playing—the disgusting waste of human resources in modern society is nowhere more evident than in the fact that most existing modes of expression manage to corrupt and vitiate whatever energies have been released by new modes of production and distribution or new modes of political liberalization. ⑳ Richard Poirier, The Performing Self (Oxford University Press, 1971), 7.

As a corollary, the stranger needs to speak himself or herself, but history cannot accommodate that reality either. It is why literature fills the gap with its ellipses and slippages; its fictional potency. “Only connect” was E.M. Forster’s advice. Without literature, there is only the haunting of the democratic ideal by the brutality of blind social practices. As Anne Cheng notes, how does recognising this tension help the real and individual subject?

But how does recognising this melancholic dilemma underlying dominant power help those who have been buried and then resuscitated only as serviceable ghosts? ㉑ Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford University Press, 2001), 13.

It is possible to argue that in the longue durée, change will outrun the traditional expression of it. In other words, as Poirier may have predicted, new modes of production will accommodate new modes of expression. Therefore should not the ‘foreign’ exist forever as an irritant to a recursive melancholia collapsing into collectively ‘pure’ nostalgias? Could not the foreign be familiar? Could not mobility be expressed in liquid morphemes: prefixes and suffixes that re-define affiliations and filiations? Could Chinese-Australian be as valued as Asian-American?

It may be helpful to consider at this point, unhitching the idea of “housedness” from the nation. The notion of “being unhoused” strives to generate a communitarian melancholy for those who have imagined communities. For the foreigner though, there is no settlement or mainstream; they only have a deferred world; a world continually “elsewhere”, to be made and to be invented. The nation of course, continues to take comfort in its own “gracious” hospitality, even though its real aim is to attain cheap labour or to attract investment. But the new melancholic asylum-seeker is resistant to the state’s injunction of desire and extortion of identity as something due to it. The melancholic refugee abuses the state’s rhetorical “hospitality” because he or she does not want to be special, on a lower rung, on a temporary visa or at the governor’s pleasure. They want to resemble with minimal difference, not to destabilise or revolutionise the adopted culture but to be on a par with it. The refugee, the alien, the foreigner, the asylum seeker, is always in excess, overflowing the borders, the boundaries which the law creates, for he or she will never fit in without denouncing his or her otherness, past, or pigmentation. Insistent, minor ‘transgressions’ like peaceful demonstrations, infiltrate social order and stretch these boundaries of hospitality to inscribe equal status and ownership. The melancholic refugee feels a need to confront the ‘discourse’ of the law, which is always on the side of consensual threat and punishment. In doing this, they return to their singularity and to an altered status: a state of grace; a bare but sacred life. Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, defines the “sacred” person as one who can be killed but not sacrificed. This figure falls within the parameters of the taboo (more like an “Untouchable” in India.) As Agamben says:

[…] once brought back to his proper place beyond both penal law and sacrifice, homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. ㉒ Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press,1998), 82.

Put simply and by analogy, the asylum-seeker, the boat-person, is both sacred and profane in the eyes of the state, someone who could be allowed to die, but not sacrificed (as in a war), to the state’s democratic ideal. What is available to the stranger who is excluded from the state on this count is a melancholic dissension. His or her behaviour is gratuitous and has nothing to do with gratitude or the payment of dues, but with the individual's sense of a future vindication which may never occur.

For the foreigner, this behaviour can take the form of “writing”. It says that “if I write without being in a state of subalternity and if I do it with a minimal difference, then sometime, somewhere, you will understand how to read me.” In other words, the foreigner overturns the predominant rhetoric and apostrophizes the dominant culture, which they see as temporarily dead and which perhaps in an ideal time, will be in sympathy with her or with him. To write, therefore, is to act, to perform and to sustain a phantasmatic address to the future rather than to produce an expression of the self in real time. The ghosts of the past are not resuscitated through the memory of exclusion from the host-nation, but are laid to rest in a future-mourning because writing is posterity. Speaking inside the fiction which nevertheless activates psychic and perhaps social change, this intradiegetic moment is one form of resolution of the melancholic dilemma to which Cheng alludes – ignoring the unresolved issue of race outside the written “universe” by addressing everybody as multiply-raced on the inside of the narrative. As Rosa Cappiello writes:

The atrophied breath of the ethnic communities was wafted to me on the wind. As a new member I adamantly refused to have anything to do with it. I spat on it since, rather than being a cohesive basis for race or tradition, it served as a pretext for the creation of separate, mutually inimical little universes. I would not, must not, sacrifice my individuality. ㉓ Rosa R. Cappiello, Oh Lucky Country, trans. Gaetano Rando (Sydney University Press, 2009), 5.

Countering displacement, accusations of disorder and marginalization, the stranger-as-writer (there is an existential difference between this kind of writer and the writer-as-stranger since the latter creates an imaginary world for the consumption of the host and cannot account for authentic aspects of the refugee unconscious or for its unique personal experience), the stranger-as-writer engages readers as though it were a medieval carnival rather than a theatrical performance:

[…] carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. ㉔ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Indiana University Press, 1984), 7.

Just as Judith Butler has pointed out that gender proves to be performative, ㉕ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990). “foreign-ness” is also performative in daily life as a form of carnivalesque. The stranger has his or her own equilibrium, but masks it, as a madman masks his balance, according to Michel Foucault, “beneath the cloud of illusion, beneath feigned disorder; the rigor of the architecture is concealed beneath the cunning arrangement of these disordered violences.” ㉖ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990).

The stranger-as-writer is neither a romantic genius nor mad. They are, in fact, melancholic and Shakespearean. They are Everyman’s Hamlet, but instead of Hamlet’s fully formed sentences and badinage, the refugee and/or migrant writer performs his or her broken language, fragmenting it further to destabilize the listener. Unsupported by the state, they take on an irresponsible self. His or her unreason is that of a poet’s. Unable to feel at home, they produce kinships out of words, making resemblances - and not only have they to delve deeper into the affinities of languages, but there is often no one there to receive them. Out of this broken pottery, placed there by others before them, they reconstruct simulacra. They are both feigned madman or mad woman, and a handy-person poet. Both stage-actor and bricoleur, living for what James Wood called “the irresponsibility of metaphor” they indulge in “boisterous monologues of speculation and association.” ㉗ James Wood, The Irresponsible Self (Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2005), 44. The stranger-as-writer is well aware of the distance from home, from family, from the protection of the state. Carrying several “languages” within, they possess a skill which can be employed in its broken unity to subvert logic and cultural stereotyping. Without, they deterritorialize the host language while carving out a space in the national literature.

As Deleuze and Guattari point out, Kafka was a Jew living in Prague where German was the official language. While Kafka spoke German and Czech and began to learn Hebrew, he did a remarkable thing. He once spoke publicly in Yiddish. He said Yiddish frightened. As Deleuze and Guattari wrote:

[…] it is a language that is lacking a grammar and that is filled with vocables that are fleeting, mobilized, emigrating, and turned into nomads that interiorize “relations of force.” It is a language that is grafted onto Middle-High German and that so reworks the German language from within that one cannot translate it into German without destroying it. ㉘ Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 25.

There are ample examples of this phenomenon in Australian migrant writing. (When I use the word migrant I also embed the words refugee or asylum-seeker, since in Australian history these terms seem to have had many overlaps in that original refugees became known as “migrants” or “New Australians.” At the present moment of course, past hostility towards migrant populations is now focussed sharply on asylum-seekers.) It is in the category of migrant writing where one will find early experimentation with language, resistances to national myths and deterritorializations of English. The provocative poetry of Ania Walwicz, the Rabelaisian unreason of Rosa Cappiello, the fractures and schisms of the writings of Ouyang Yu, the dislocations and willed dyslexia of Antigone Kefala, the anarchism of PiO, all attest to the plangency of the migrant condition as well as to the challenge of subversion. Like Hamlet, there is as much self-accusation in their words as there is estrangement. Most readers outside Australia would not have heard of any of these writers. Their knowledge of Australian writers will resound with different names, names which form part of the national project.

For the stranger of course, their truth, affiliation and existence will always be regarded with suspicion. (Is Enlightenment rationality more valid or more powerful than tribal storytelling in the arena of belief?) It is interesting to note that in nations which define themselves through the exclusion of others … Australia being a case in point … the sense of being authentically “true” has already been appropriated. One can be “true blue” … an Australian expression for being “honest”, “decent” and in parentheses, “white”, but one cannot be a “true Pakistani” or a “true Chinese”, mainly because their birthright has been denied in the Australian context. Therefore, an authentic identity can never be conferred upon them. It is up to them to invent their context. How do they do it? Julia Kristeva comments that:

Without a home [the foreigner] disseminates on the contrary the actor’s paradox: multiplying masks and “false selves” he is never completely true nor completely false, as he is able to tune in to loves and aversions the superficial antennae of a basaltic heart. ㉙ Strangers To Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1991), 8.

Kristeva’s trope of the “false self” must also come under question. A false self is not the same as a feigned self. A false self implies confusion to oneself, a tortured ambivalence which not only buttresses assumptions of the foreigner as being unstable and deceitful, but again places upon him the ascription of impotence. It is important to see the feigned self as empowering, a Hamlet-like mockery of the nation’s unawareness, of its drive to identity, a rhetorical procedure which demonstrates a disjunction between speech and secret thought, between masking and feeling, between irony and affectation. It is no wonder that the subversions and oppositions of Modernism passed Australia by, its one brief burgeoning deflowered by a hoax. ㉚ See for example, David Lehman's piece, “The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax—An Introduction”, in Jacket Magazine vol. 2. The establishment of an identitarian literature followed closely upon a hunger for authenticity, upon the “real” for its justification.

Another answer to the ineffectual ethics of simply demanding respect for the Other lies partly in Alain Badiou’s little book Saint Paul – The Foundation of Universalism. Badiou notes that in the iteration of identity, the law no longer becomes neutral. As Pétain issued the Jews in France with a special status, identitarian verification takes precedence over the law. The foreigner can never escape this special status. By reason of their name, appearance, birthplace, they are forever relegated to suspicion by the law. The stranger’s loyalty will never be trusted as much as those from the dominant culture. This is the stranger’s truth. As Badiou states: “[…] if it is true that every truth erupts as singular, its singularity is immediately universalizable. Universalizable singularity necessarily breaks with identitarian singularity.” ㉛ Alain Badiou, Saint Paul – The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford University Press, 2003), 11. He argues that Saint Paul was a revolutionary who redefined truth as subjective and as universal; that it had nothing communitarian about it. Badiou’s methodology is interesting. He proceeds by an examination of Paul’s prose. The latter wrote in Greek, but it was not an esoteric prose. It was the language of traders and writers; it was contemporary and quotidian. Badiou says Paul “propounds a speech of rupture”, ㉜ Alain Badiou, Saint Paul – The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford University Press, 2003), 31. “depriving [the reader] of all respite … [which] resemble[s] Shakespearean declamations.” ㉝ Alain Badiou, Saint Paul – The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford University Press, 2003), 33. But Saint Paul’s is also the prose of a populist who was at best ambivalent about the place of women and it was also a preaching which de-Judaised his community. It was not the prose of an outsider, a foreigner or a refugee. Insurrectionist narratives rarely rely on the parody employed by the powerless.

While universal citizenship formulated by the Enlightenment is tainted by an implied ethnocentrism, the foreigner can still employ universality to destabilise imagined identities by placing universality outside the present, constructing it as a work-in-progress, a future universality in which he or she can be proven correct. This future universality is essential in solving the dilemma of being seen to be without history and at the same time is portrayed as yearning for an imaginary homeland which stymies integration into a new society. This seeming contradiction is an ethical position, a positivity in refusing to betray the lost object of melancholy. As Slavoj Žižek has written:

This story can be given a multitude of twists, from the queer one … to the postcolonial/ethnic one, which holds that when ethnic groups enter capitalist processes of modernization and are under the threat that their specific legacy will be swallowed up by the new global culture, they should not renounce their tradition through mourning, but retain the melancholic attachment to their lost roots. ㉞ Slavoj Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act”, Critical Inquiry 26:4 (Summer 2000): 658.

Living in this virtual space of a subjective universality rather than in the new global culture, the stranger's legacy can only blossom after his or her death. Walter Benjamin and Kafka are striking examples. Saint Paul had a subjective memory of resurrection which became an insurrection. But memory, as Badiou says, cannot settle any issue. Witness the number of anti-Semites who claim to deny the Holocaust through their individual memory of never having witnessed the mass deportations. Some said that the Jews “simply disappeared.” On the other hand, the memory of those who have been traumatised can initiate a preventative process which prophetically envisions the horrors to come. (In this way art displaces life through hallucinating the future.) As Badiou says, it is not about knowledge but about grace. This subjective surge, braced by memory, focussing upon a posterity which may never occur (what Theodore Adorno would have called “messages in bottles,” ㉟ Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia (Verso, 2005), 209. is a melancholic resistance. At the moment of actual collapse, will and creativity form an alliance to produce an excess of apocalyptic visions. I emphasize here the will, because for the most part, this is the strongest aspect of a foreigner’s personality. It was the will that forced change for him or her; the will to flee, the will to survive. A will running parallel to chaos, because at the same time, sociality is never far from catastrophic. As Paul Carter points out, the Greek word chaos signified “…the yawning, or gaping open of time and space to permit creation.” ㊱ Paul Carter, Material Thinking (Melbourne University Press, 2004), 3. Within society, the foreigner becomes foreign to himself or herself, and so by performing irony and exaggeration, there is a will to creative and linguistic production. But if this performance seeks sympathy through victimage, it risks failure. The abject ethnic relying upon victimhood is depleted of all agency, least of all theoretical agency. Melancholic self-reproach and abjection is not an option. In this kind of melancholic mood, with nothing left to lose, how can there be subversion and challenge without the mimicry of language? Appealing to the highest levels achieved by the colonial language, taking on the textual playfulness of what has been studied, he or she distances the personal while universalising subjectivity in order to seduce and to provoke. The tables are turned against those who would universalise the (collective) strangers’ case. (One can see for example, how Sir Thomas More could be used as a target of parody, or as a weapon of parody if the actor playing Thomas More were black.) Salman Rushdie's work is a case in point. While appropriating English literature to call down an already available authority, he employs seemingly "autobiographical" material in an exaggerated, parodic, fragmented and erratic way to act as an irritant to national reason and to legitimacy. The opposite – silence, scrupulous syntax and the non-arrival of a supposed "message" such as Kafka’s – can also achieve the same disturbance. Judith Butler, in an article examining the current controversy over who owns Kafka's unpublished letters, muses over the ironies implicit in national jostling:

There seems to be a sense that Germany might be, all in all, a more secure location. But of course another part of the argument is that Kafka belongs to German literature and, specifically, to the German language. And though there is no attempt to say that he belongs to Germany as one of its past or virtual citizens, it seems that Germanness here transcends the history of citizenship and pivots on the question of linguistic competence and accomplishment. The argument of the German Literature Archive effaces the importance of multilingualism for Kafka’s formation and for his writing. (Indeed, would we have the Babel parables without the presumption of multilingualism, and would communication falter so insistently in his works without that backdrop of Czech, Yiddish and German converging in Kafka’s world?)

In what ways must Kafka’s multilingualism and his Czech origins be ‘purified’ in order to have him stand for a pure German? Is what is most remarkable or admirable about him that he seems to have purified himself, exemplifying the self-purifying capacities of the Ausländer? ㊲ Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?” London Review of Books 33:5 (March 3, 2011): 5.span>

Kafka, in the framework of my analysis of the melancholy migrant, was performing minimal difference. (One could say the same of Joseph Conrad.) More importantly, the language in Kafka's parables form a kind of reverse Babel. It is not a confusion of languages but the silent "non-arrival" of the message, which is often occluded or prevented from being delivered, and it draws upon that for its mystery and power. Butler goes on to link this with Kafka's hoped-for, but non-arrival in Palestine:

From where precisely does this hope emerge? Here as elsewhere, the problem of destination touches on the question of emigrating to Palestine, but also on the problem, more generally, of whether messages can arrive and commands be rightly understood. Non-arrival describes the linguistic predicament of writing in a multilingual context, exploiting the syntactical rules of formal German to produce an uncanny effect, but also writing in a contemporary Babel where the misfires of language come to characterise the everyday situation of speech, whether amorous or political. The question that re-emerges in parables like “An Imperial Message: is whether a message can be sent from here to there, or whether someone can travel from here to there, or indeed ‘over there’ – whether an expected arrival is really possible. ㊳ Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?” London Review of Books 33, no. 5 (March 3, 2011): 7.

The stranger's undermining of acceptable rhetoric and his or her non-delivery of the message (of melancholy) also gives him or her the power of divination. (In avoiding abjection they are delivered as a real sacrifice to the future – there is an element of prophecy in subversion and in the discomfort that haunts the present.) The stranger's is a "voice from beyond the grave", as Naomi Schor commented in relation to Chateaubriand:

Anonymity stalks the dead—the dead keep dying—because dying is not a singular event, but rather and implausibly an event that is given to repetition. Dead languages complete the inaccessibility of the dead: for the voice from beyond the grave to become audible it must speak an intelligible, that is a living, a spoken language; [...] ㊴ Naomi Schor, “One Hundred Years of Melancholy,” The Zaharoff Lecture, (Oxford University Press, 1996), 9.

It is a strange form of hope similar to Saint Paul's dream of a resurrection. The stranger, the Ausländer, is driven into a superior imaginative wisdom by a reversal of sense which results from a studied weakness. The “illness” of melancholia, hitherto defined as its weaker pole, projects a deferred hope when coupled with its agentic desire to be vindicated by the test of time. There is such a thing as a subjective and universal truth. This truth enters in the pauses and silences. As Bridget Gellert Lyons notes, it is not melancholy as “excess and incongruity” which characterises Hamlet’s utterances, but melancholy as associated with “knowledge of the truth”. ㊵ Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy (W.W. Norton, 1971), 99. Hamlet’s discourse is errant. It wanders and returns; it gestures; so there is a space created for a silence coming from elsewhere. This is the procedure in psychoanalysis, which listens for gaps and slips. Truth is a kind of voicelessness, entering from elsewhere, which also possesses the uncanny power of future prediction, often revealed retrospectively. Hearing this silence is a skill, for truth, like melancholy, cannot be spoken, only enacted; as Badiou says, it is an “event” which is retroactive. ㊶ Alain Badiou, Saint Paul, 81. What is due to the migrant is nothing. They are essentially gratuitous, and as Badiou says of Paul, redeemed only by charisma. ㊷ Alain Badiou, Saint Paul, 77. This kind of truth-telling results from a “nomadism of gratuitousness”. ㊸ Alain Badiou, Saint Paul, 78. It goes one step further than non-arrival, allowing the entrance of unintentional truths from the wings, the result of a negative dialectics implicit in melancholia. Through non-identity, through differentiation and paradox and the use of riddles, such a “logic of disintegration” ㊹ Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2006), 144. as Adorno proposed, sunders thought from domination. The stranger’s case confounds the binary perception of the “us and them.” It gets behind the lines of demarcation. As Max Pensky said of the politics of melancholia:

A melancholy politics thus glides into a secret, half-willing collaboration with the forces it seeks to oppose. This is the invariable result when melancholy, like all other syndromes and affectations of “high” literature, is de-auraticized, removed from its esoteric aloofness, and thrust onto a political and economic stage. ㊺ Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 11.

Instrumental (Enlightenment) reasoning does not know what to do with this apparently negative and gratuitous “uselessness”, since political action often arises from such reflectiveness. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi noted: “Everyone knows the usefulness of what is useful, but few know the usefulness of what is useless.” ㊻ Qtd in Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness, (Black Inc., 2011), 399.

What is apparent, at least in France, is that the perceived decline and depression of the nation is being rescued by the writing of migrants, post-colonial subjects, foreigners who employ the French language. But this has remained a blind spot in the curricula of universities, whose increasing utilitarian nature fosters national agenda and national histories rather than say, the uses of melancholia, as a fit subject of study. In his introduction to issue 59 of Granta in 1997, the editor Ian Jack lamented that French literature was unpopular around the world because it was cloaked in meaninglessness, introspection and navel-gazing. He identified writers from French territories outside Europe as representing the way forward. Jürgen Habermas also focuses on the “new multiplicity of hybridized forms”. He identifies constellations of subcultures as constructing “new modes of belonging” strengthening “a trend towards individualization and the emergence of “cosmopolitan identities.” ㊼ Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, trans. Max Pensky, (Polity Press, 2001), 75-76.

Julia Kristeva’s conflation not only of depression with melancholia, but of the nation and the individual condition speaks for the communitarian ideal of self-confidence and for the good intentions of hospitality. Yet it also makes voicelessness an illness caused by a nation’s unawareness, rather than seeing a cure for the nation's ills in that very polyphony and cacophony of strangers we are hearing and seeing around ourselves, speaking to “us” and within the “we”. A major discourse around displacement can only sustain itself within a minor literature. It relies on the court-jester to produce truth in a dumb-show, or on foreigners who enact their own individual story of melancholic self-deception. They blow their own trumpet, while being mindful of extinction.

This, I would suggest, is really the stranger's case; a case of shifting the apostrophe from the periphery to the centre of individual thought.

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Works Cited

✷ Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Verso, 2005.
———. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2006.
✷ Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, 1998.
✷ Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford University Press, 2003.
✷ Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Indiana University Press, 1984.
✷ Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Harvard University Press, 1997.
✷ Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
———. “Who Owns Kafka?” London Review of Books 33, no. 5 (March 3, 2011): 5–7.
✷ Cappiello, Rosa R. Oh Lucky Country. Translated by Gaetano Rando. Sydney University Press, 2009.
✷ Carter, Paul. Material Thinking. Melbourne University Press, 2004.
✷ Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford University Press, 2001.
✷ Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
✷ Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. Vintage, 1973.
✷ Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 1919.
———. Mourning and Melancholia. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Penguin Classics, 2005.
✷ Gratton, Peter. “What Are Psychoanalysts For in a Destitute Time? Kristeva and the Community in Revolt.” Journal for Cultural Research 11, no. 1 (January 2007): 1–13.
✷ Habermas, Jürgen. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Translated by Max Pensky. Polity Press, 2001.
✷ Haigh, Samantha. “Migration and Melancholia: From Kristeva’s ‘Dépression Nationale’ to Pineau’s ‘Maladie de l’Exile’.” French Studies 60, no. 2 (2006): 232–50.
✷ Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1991.
✷ Lehman, David. “The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax – An Introduction.” Jacket Magazine 2.
✷ Lepenies, Wolf. Melancholy and Society. Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones. Harvard University Press, 1992.
✷ Leys, Simon. The Hall of Uselessness. Black Inc., 2011.
✷ Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian-American Difference.” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 24–44.
✷ Lyons, Bridget Gellert. Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in the Renaissance. W.W. Norton, 1971.
✷ Munday, Anthony, et al. Sir Thomas More. 1844.
✷ Pensky, Max. Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning. University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
✷ Poirier, Richard. The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life. Oxford University Press, 1971.
✷ Schor, Naomi. “One Hundred Years of Melancholy.” The Zaharoff Lecture. Oxford University Press, 1996.
✷ Schipper, Birgit. Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought: From the Rejection of Identity to the Politics of Difference. Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
✷ Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation. Yale University Press, 2001.
✷ Wood, James. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
✷ Žižek, Slavoj. “Melancholy and the Act.” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 657–81.

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Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage. He is an award-winning author of twelve novels and in 2014 received the Patrick White Award in recognition of his significant contribution to Australian literature.

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