“[T]he question  is not as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong”  - Marcel Proust's diagnosis of the change of etre (being) into en etre (being one of them, belonging) is developed by Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva  and defines the human condition of today. The very question of survival forces us into the  membership of a nation, gender, profession, sexual preference. What matters is admittance to a clan, alliance with “them” which is to bring status, image and power over opinion. This is how we lose ourselves in the social against which Arendt warned and where – to return to Hegel and Kojeve - the dialectic of master and servant rules. Closing ourselves off from inner life, we enter a game of capital and spectacle, and the New World Order where politics devalues and the human subject is not only neglected, but absent.

This fall of subjectivity may be probed theoretically. Whilst subiectum as a ‘presence’ monopolized the problems of philosophy, the question of being, according to Martin Heidegger, was forgotten; now it is time to remind the lost question of subjectivity – and ask not only about being, but also about the subject. Julia Kristeva poses the question when coining the notion and forging the theory of the subject-in-process. I would situate this philosophy of plural intra- and intersubjectivity as a third way between the post-Aristotelian absolutization of identity in the subject, and the postmodern denouncing of subjectivity as null and void. In Western philosophy it is the paradigm of a homogeneous, inveterate and closed subject whose prototype is hypokeimenon that dominates and is continued from the Cartesian “first person” through the Fichtean “I” to the models of contemporary cognitive sciences and communitarianism; here another identification surfaces: thinking with subjectivity (cogito, the cognitivist subject as a system of rules for processing information). In the theoretizations of intersubjectivity, the law of identity had been in power even before it was formulated by Leibniz: however controversial, and particularly unclear in the definition of quality, this definition imposes identity between subjects, even in the philosophy of so-called dialogue. Depuis toujours religious and artistic experiences have revealed the limiting of the problem of subjectivity conceived of as identity, which was reiterated by the modernist discovery of the unconscious and the simultaneous phenomenological breakthrough. Heidegger's admonitions against the monopolization of the problem of being by subjectivity were misred by postmodernists as a call for the  announcement of a “death of the subject” in Foucault's Les mots et les choses. In turn Heidegger's questioning of Einheit der Identitaet and the postulate of das Differente aus der Differenz  led to Jacques Derrida's extreme of differance that “differs/defers, produces” differences , which Habermas accurately defined as the practice of “process without subject' . The paradigm of “subject without process”, reason and the community of Sameness, was regarded in postmodernism as exhausted and impossible, and replaced by an equally reductive theory.
 

HOW IS THE SUBJECT-IN-PROCESS POSSIBLE?

Julia Kristeva’s is a rich trajectory: born during World War II in Sophia and raised behind the Iron Curtain by the Francophone Dominican nuns and in the Komsomol alike. Professor at Denis Diderot University Paris 7 and at Columbia, she develops a heterodox, albeit systemic, thought in the borderlands of philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis and art. Kristeva confesses: “In my French you can hear the polyphony of languages, while my thought is a mixture of logical systems, dragging me towards the dramaturgy of bodies and worlds in a conflict which I struggle to harmonise” . Accordingly, she theorizes the equivocal and heterogeneous subject-in-process.

It is polylogic which forms a driving force of this processive subjectivity: 'poly-logue: the multiplying of rationalizations as an answer to the crisis of Western reason.' (5) Kristeva's neologism points out, however, to further meanings: the prefix 'poly-', derived from the Indo-European root '*pele-', '*ple' ('many, full'), 'plethora' ('fullness, abundance, excess') and 'polys' ('numerous, large, powerful'), has been coupled here with the French equivalent of the Greek 'logos'. In this way we step into the plethora of senses in Heraclitus, Plato, Philo, Stoics, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger (his apophatic 'logocentrism') and Arendt.
The process of the emergence of meanings, signifiance, becomes subject to Kristevan analysis; the very term 'signifiance', derived from medieval modistae, through its active suffix '-iance' is intended to stress dynamism in contrast to the immobile 'significance'. The process involves an interaction of two modalities: the semiotic and the symbolic. A prefiguration of the former is to be found in the Platonic 'chora' of the 'Timaeus', thus the moving 'place' of union and contradiction, preceding the universe, the name and even the syllable. It is a vessel ('hypodocheion') of becoming with maternal ('tithene') connotations. The 'space' of provisional articulation, constituting itself in motions and ephemeral standstills, amorphous, based on rhythm. Although Derrida accuses Plato of ontologizing Leucippus's and Democritus's 'rhythm' with a conceptualisation of the 'chora', Kristeva does not hesitate to designate pre-symbolic modality with this term. The semiotic (Kristeva goes back to the etymology of 'semeion', 'a trace, or signs, of an inscribed mark, an impression, distinguishing features') constitutes the distinction capable of underdefined articulation, still (in children) or already (in psychotic or poetic discourse) not referring to the signifie of the Husserlian thetic consciousness. What one encounters here are drives (theoretized by Freud: 'Triebe') and their articulation (whose status is only established by Kristeva): rhythm, pulsation, intonation. Prelinguistically, the semiotic is to be found in the pre-Oedipal phase:  child's first rhythms, pseudo-syllables and echolalia. Not only are the shouts, vocalisations and gestures of a child semiotic, but also the translinguistic prosody, word-games, nonsense and laughter of the adult. Logically the semiotic functions as the suprasegmental, irrational, instinctive in various discourses (particularly in experimental literature) in the completion of sign and predicate, which in turn mark the symbolic. The latter is the sphere of nomination, syntax, denotation, which constitutes itself in the child from the Lacan mirror phase, awakening the ability of representation and abstraction; this is social order.
Decentred, cut open and ready for the interaction of these modalities, the subject-in-process 'is incessantly semiotic and symbolic'. In my opinion, the 'and' reveals the Kristevan ambition to go beyond  such dichotomization as in the division between 'mania' and 'restraint' in Plato's 'Phaedrus', between the 'affects' and 'mind' in Spinoza's geometroidal definitions, between the Nietzschean 'Dionysian' and 'Apollonian', or between Foucault's 'madness' and 'mind'. In Kristeva's project of subjectivity a dialectic of the semiotic and symbolic is revealed, going back to the Hegelian understanding of dialectic as an 'old science' (not art), which returns anew, and it becomes necessary to draw conclusions different from those in the history of philosophy. Kristeva 'furnishes' the Hegelian dialectic with heterogeneity, only to arrive at her own definition of dialectics as 'a heterogeneous contradiction between two spheres which are irreconcilable, divided, but inseparable in a process which accepts asymmetrical functions.'  These conclusions are complemented by a statement that in the definition of an intra-subjective dialectic, Rene Thom's catastrophe theory would be helpful if extrapolated onto an epistemological level; as the semiotic and symbolic space are not subject to the same laws, the external space, called the control, acts in such a way towards internal space that the change of control evokes a bifurcation, which either as a discontinuum or as a conflict constitutes catastrophe. The Hegelian 'fourth term of dialectics', 'Negativitaet', turns out to be in Kristeva's opinion the organizing principle, the 'pattern' of the process. Negativity, as opposed to nothingness or negation, 'sets in motion'  and  creates the subject in process, claims Kristeva. In other words, the subject constituting itself according to the laws of negativity cannot be anything other than its own subject penetrated by negativity, un-subjected ('un sujet non-assujetti'), free .
 

CONFEDERATION OF STRANGENESSES

It is not unity or differance then but plurality which marks intrasubjectivity in Kristeva's view, far both from the traditional subject of identity and from the zero point of the subjectivity under postmodernism. Let us now trace how Kristeva transfers the processive theories of intra- onto intersubjectivity. Here are her proposals in praxi: the aim of a contemporary state ought not to be an  integration of  immigrants, but a guarantee of their right to choose strangeness. Immigrants should respect the strangeness of their hosts; in this way a 'confederation of strangeness', co-ordinated by 'esprit general' will be constituted. It is Montesquieu opposes the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, proposing instead as a principle of 'the rights of the soul' the idea of 'sociabilite humaine', which follows in the footsteps of Fenelon's Christian theology, and Locke's and Shaftesbury's writings. In her open letter addressed to Harlem Desir, the leader of the S.O.S. Racisme organisation, Kristeva returns to the concept of the 'esprit general' put forward in Book XIX, chapter 4 of 'The Spirit of the Laws': 'About laws and their connection with the principles creating the esprit general, habits and customs of a nation'. The 'esprit general' is not an abstraction (operating in abstractions was a charge levelled against the Enlightenment from Edmund Burke to Hannah Arendt), but a reformulation of the problem of national identity: the national, in Kristeva's interpretation, is understood as a relative stability (tradition) and the predominant instability, finding itself in the process. Montesquieu argues for a multiple causality of nature and culture 'Human beings are ruled by several things: climate, religion, laws, principles of government, examples of things past, customs, manners; as a result, an esprit general is constituted'. Around that which is national there operates, in Kristeva's argumentation, a logical multiplicity whose variety ought to be retained, ruling out any social group’s hegemony. In this social polylogic instead of a 'static, biological, totalizing, archaic and unmoving' idea of a nation, we are faced with the heterogeneity and dynamism of the 'esprit general'. Not to reject the national as a social construct, but to transcend it into a transnational position, which is allowed for by the openness of the 'esprit general' idea as opposed to 'Volksgeist' - such are Kristeva's postulates. Interpretations of Montesquieu's political thought was carried out in the post-war period by such different philosophers as Althusser, Arendt and Aron, but it was Kristeva who emphasised its universal cosmopolitanism. 'If I knew something useful to myself and detrimental to my family, I would reject it from my mind. If I knew something useful to my family but not to my homeland, I would try to forget it. If I  knew something useful to my homeland and detrimental to Europe, or else useful to Europe and detrimental to Mankind, I would consider it a crime.' Kristeva emphasises the necessity of guaranteeing personal freedom and entering into ever wider communities on condition that in they are multiple, open-ended, polyvalent.

In the thought of the Enlightenment an intuition emerges that the stranger is within me: 'Rameau's Nephew' by Diderot forms a dialogue between the 'I' and the 'He', links the universalism of the enlightenment with the recognition of otherness. 'Bizarre, playful, cynical, erotic, having a spasmodic body, an ironic, allusive, polyphonic, and often elliptic language, a critic of social mores, but also of the philosophic reasoning of the reasonable 'Myself', 'He' in Diderot's text inserts strangeness into us. The consciousness of the Nephew, diagnosed by Hegel as torn asunder, is - according to Kristeva - symptomatic of culture which knows that it is at least double. To be conscious of one's own unconscious is a civilizing step; let us try - not unlike the Nephew - to recognise ourselves as strangers in order to appreciate the strangers around us, instead of persecuting and adapting them to the norms of our own repression.

THE STRANGER WITHIN

In his essay of 1919 Freud philologically explicates the feeling of 'das Unheimliche'. The semantics of the adjective 'heimlich' evolves towards ambivalence until it coincides with the meaning of its initial antonym, furnished with the privative prefix, 'unheimlich' . The familiar, homely, intimate, domestic is at the same time the hidden, secret, suspicious, demonic, strange, unnerving, alien. Freud quotes Schelling, who states that as 'unheimlich' can be qualified what should remain secret, in the shadow, but comes out from there. The Brothers Grimm note in their 'Deutsches Woerterbuch' that the Latin counterparts of 'heimlich' are 'vernaculus', and 'mysticus', 'divinus', 'occultus' and 'figuratus'. The experience 'des Unheimlichen' according to Freud relates to fear, the double, repetition and the unconscious, while among its catalysts are death, the feminine and drive. The exemplification of these theses is an analysis of the Sand-Man from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, 'the incomparable master ''des Unheimlichen'' in literature'. Let us add that in philosophy the master of this experience is Heidegger, who, in 'Sein und Zeit', writes that 'In der Angst ist einem ''unheimlich''. Heidegger adds that 'Unheimlichkeit' stands for being-in-the-world, when there is a breakdown of familiarity in the sense of 'living beside...', being familiar with...', being takes on the existential modus of 'not in one's own home'. As Cezary Wodzinski argues the very word 'Unheimlich' is 'ein unheimliches Wort' according to Heidegger who translates with it the term 'deinotaton' from Stasimon I of 'Antigone'. The Sophoclean and 'the true Greek definition of man' is 'Das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen ist der Mensch'. Familiarity without the uncanny strangeness - let us return to Kristeva's statement - changes being into belonging. 'The uncanny of human being, writes Wodzinski, stands also for a break in the predominance of being, a breach, a crack in which being reveals itself'.

Yet again Kristeva returns to Hegelian negativity, which 'rehabilitates and systematises, forges the chains which it then puts onto the power of the Other, against and in the consciousness of Him Himself': this process leads to the Freudian discovery of the unconscious and of strangeness. She situates the concept 'des Unheimlichen' next to Stoic cosmopolitanism and religious universalism as an attitude of accepting strangers in an uncanniness, theirs and ours alike. Kristeva perceives strangeness in a multiple subject, strangeness which incessantly accompanies familiarity: 'the stranger is within me. The ethics of psychoanalysis implies politics: this means cosmopolitanism, which transcends governments, economies, markets and opens out to a humanity conscious of its own unconsciousness - desiring, destructive, full of fear, impossible'. Only after an analysis of religious cosmopolitanism can we see how the Kristevan project of strangeness (inspired by them) attempts to approach being.
 

THOU SHALT LOVE THE STRANGER AS THYSELF

Although the Covenant with YHWH makes Jews the chosen nation, from the very beginning strangeness is inscribed herein. As everyone is created in the image of God, the Levitical imperative 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' (Leviticus 19,18) refers not only to one's neighbour from the same family or nation. According to Kedoshim 'just as it is said about the man from Israel that thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, the same applies to the stranger'. And so in Leviticus in the Torah we read: 'And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. [...] and thou shalt love him as thyself: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt' (Leviticus 19,34). No other command is repeated in the Torah more often, but on the other hand the use of the word 'ger' here indicates the stranger's potential for proselytism.

Kristeva retells the story of Ruth: foreigner, yet a matriarch in the genealogy of David.  It was forbidden to marry a foreign woman, particularly a Moabite, as the Moabites had not accepted the Jews at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. A Jew, Elimelech left Judea and settles in Moabia, where his sons married the Moabite princesses, Orpah and Ruth. After the death of her husband Ruth returned with her mother-in-law, Naomi, to Bethlehem for she wanted to be loyal to Naomi (why not call this loyalty passionate?, asks Kristeva) and faithful to her God: 'Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God' (Ruth 1,16) For the Judeans she was still a foreigner, and the time of her conversion remains unclear. Naomi, following the Levitical rules, ought to find 'a redeemer, a kinsman' ('goel'): the first in line was Tov, then Boaz; and it is to him that Ruth directed her question: 'Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou shouldest take knowledge of me, seeing I am a stranger?' (Ruth 2,10). Boaz replied: 'Thou art come unto a people which thou knewest not heretofore. The Lord recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust' (Ruth 2,12). Rabbinical commentators emphasise that the merits of Ruth surpass these of Abraham, and thus she is worthy of a perfect reward; Abraham left his father's home on God's orders, but Ruth the foreigner did the same on her own initiative. In the Book of   Ruth Boaz praises the acts of 'faithfulness' and 'goodwill, compassion, goodness' ('hesed') of the heroine, the future mother of Obed, the grandfather of David. Although the intervention of strangers in the royal genealogy will be pointed out with indignation ('How many times will they tell me in anger saying that he comes from an unworthy line? Is he not the descendant of Ruth the Moabite?' Ruth Rabba 8,1), Kristeva reads the story of Ruth as a parable of recognizing and accepting radical otherness.

THERE IS NEITHER GREEK NOR JEW

In Christ's genealogy Matthew enumerates Ruth as one of four women. But let us begin, following Kristeva's thought, from the strangeness of the persecutor, then the messenger of the Anointed, Saul/Paul: the 'Jew of Jews', a Roman citizen, came from the cultural melting-pot on the borders of Asia Minor and Syria, from the Greek city of Tarsus. Brought up in a Hellenistic environment, he received a rabbinical education. In the multiplicity of his name he played his social Jewish role with a Hebrew name, and his Greek part with a Greek one; the cognomen Paulus indicates the connection with the converted proconsul of Cyprus. In the Pauline polyphony there will sound journeys, when the apostle addresses merchants, sailors, exiles and women, turning a small Jewish sect into the 'ecclesia', a new kind of community tearing itself away from 'laos' (Greek community), since it is formed from those who transcend national affiliation . Here is an exemplum of Pauline universalism from his prison letters: 'ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.' (Colossians 3, 9-11). The subjective and the universal is crosses for the 'summoned' (the etymology of 'ecclesia') strangers in the 'absolute subject', the Anointed. Furthermore, in the Gospel according to John Jesus describes himself as a stranger on this earth: his followers ‘are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.’(John 17, 16). Surrounded by hostility, the Johannine community will find its home only in the mansions of the ‘Father’s house’: 'If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.' (John 15, 19)

Now it remains to let Kristeva speak: 'Let us bow, in passing, to Paul's psychological and political sensitivity. No one can forget the excesses that the puristic and inquisitorial ecclesiastical institution inflicted upon heretics, that new variant of strangers, throughout the centuries. Nevertheless Paul's spirit would be seen again many times in the history of Christendom. Thus, Augustine's 'civitas peregrina' advocated as the only state of freedom, against the state of oppression, that of pilgrimage:  tearing oneself away from places to accomplish universal mutual assistance, but also tearing oneself away from any identity (including one's own) in order to accomplish subjective fulfilment in the boundlessness of 'caritas'. The discovery of 'savages' from the Renaissance up to recent colonialism has shown the narrowness and fragility of 'caritas''s boundaries. The fact remains, nonetheless, that lacking a more thorough analysis of the motivating forces that control our ties to others and to our own otherness, the Pauline and Augustinian messages remain a means of summoning people of goodwill against xenophobia and racism, as is demonstrated by the social activity in favour of immigration of Christian churches today.'(27)

Fundamentalists appropriate the labels of monotheisms and ally with jingoism (or vice versa)  only to  produce  an  explosive  mixture  of   ideologies: a  love/hate potion which controls the people of “one and only” truth coupled with devised “blood ties”. Far from the exclusivity and militancy of fundamentalisms, monotheisms share the ideas of intertextual “holy writ”, the non-identital concept of God and the human as well as the extolement of love. They contain a potential of openness to the stranger, of cherishing “the widow, the orphan and the stranger”. Islam, about which Kristeva remains silent, proposes to “be good”, “show kindness” not only to kith and kin, but also to travellers, strangers (Koran 4, 38).
 

PROUST IN-BETWEEN

With Hannah Arendt, Kristeva shares the conviction that it was religion which discovered the inner, admitting at the same time that the prefiguration of this discovery lies in the ideas of Stoic Scholarchs, who described themselves as 'citizens of the universe', since their megapolis embraced Greeks, Barbarians, freemen, slaves and the stars: it would not however have embraced anyone without their, the Stoics', mind, and that is why it turned out to be an autarchy. But Kristeva, not unlike Arendt in Antisemitism, has managed to find a cosmopolitan nurturing the pluralised interior and strangers, because he knew that the stranger was he. Marcel Proust: a Jew and a Catholic, neither the one nor the other, in the centre and on the fringe of the Dreyfus affair and of the Great War, between sexual minority and majority. In this polylogic, Kristeva analyses the Proustian 'temps incorpore', where the world is a book, metaphor is metamorphosis, and word is flesh. The latter analogy turns the most meaningful: Proust's literary experience constituted- as the writer himself put it - a transubstantiation. Saussurian linguistics would regard transubstantiation as a lack of distinction between signifie and signifiant: in 'this is my body', 'this’ stands for the bread and the body of Christ alike. The grammar of Port-Royal rationalises the transformation through a double justification and a reference to time. Kristeva on the other hand defines transubstantiation as the thematisation of the fold between the space of need, nourishment, survival and the symbolic space of designation: the meaningful flesh.

When building the cathedral of embodied time, Proust retreated from and dissected the social and its iron logic of violence: “Do not think that you can map out a new territory, a separate and innocent clan or sect, for you will invariably find yourself caught in the same logical structure: the heady lure of being one of them or not being one of them. Our sadomasochism makes this necessary. I belong to him (to them) – he (they) love(s) me; I do not belong to him (to them) – he (they) is (are) killing me. Being is a question of love, that of belonging – of identification, and of regret.”

THE SOCIAL OR THE PUBLIC

Julia Kristeva repeats after Sigmund Freud that society is founded on a crime committed together (Totem and Taboo), which does not entail that the two psychoanalysts lead sublimation and Kultur astray. Hannah Arendt traces the etymology of society: an alliance of people for a specific purpose, as “when men organize in order to rule others or to commit a crime” . The attractive and aggressive, integrating and dangerous potencies are to be found in society, in belonging, in identity. For Kristeva, much like for Arendt, the social is the Blob  that devours more and more of the private and public realms. Ours is an age when the political has lost its symbolic quality. Therefore, removing itself from its charisma, the fall from grace at the same time galvanized egalitarianism, but also, as Kristeva argues, facilitated “wheeling and dealing and corruptions”. A vexing question of the passing century is the ambiguity of the political. “An impossible task? A useless task?”, asks  Kristeva. Totalitarianisms “perverted the project” and discouraged citizens from any engagement. The fall of Nazi and Stalinist regimes requires a questioning of the public and political sphere. As I have noticed, Kristeva after Arendt does not equate the political, the public with the social. The universe of the socius is facile, suspicious and ominous. “I don’t belong to any group”, Kristeva would like to say with Arendt. Paradoxically, with her insistence on the intimate and political, the inner experience of the polis, she becomes a public intellectual.

Society “comes apart in a welter of competing images. The social bond is a mere tracing, an imitation, a process of sleep-walking; on the social stage, every will to power, whether rooted in psychology, love or the politics of small groupings, or larger ones, breaks up and disperses like a mirage.” Conversely, the public realm is to Kristeva that of care, cherishing, nursing. It is welcoming, generosity, hospitality characterizes this realm. “I dream of a lay and public space in France which would not repress the French mosaic of strangers” , confesses the author. Kristeva’s project is to bring together polyphonic subjects in a confederation, neither a union nor a neutralization, of the public realm. In her view, the public includes the art of living (art de vivre) and taste (gout) – to blossom up in the public space (s’epanouir sur la place publique). On the other hand, an ingredient of what is public is also weakness, fragility, the vulnerable (faiblesse).

Three years after her arrival, Kristeva took part in the students’ revolt, building a barricade. French philosophers tend to identify them as historical parody of bad taste and a family psychodrama (Alexandre Kojeve, Edgar Morin). Yet Kristeva notes that the revolt of 1968 was prodromal of the permanent crisis of politics. Accused of exchanging contestation for conformism, soixante-huitards were the first to go well beyond, says the author, the philosophy of reckoning, calculation (a term used by Heidegger) into questioning. However, their thought and deed alike indulged in the social and disregarded inner experience. Kristeva postulates a transformation from within. There are ways of penetrating and celebrating your psychic space, says the author. Only then can we flee personal and political depression, and recover the public realm.

That is why although she celebrates the uniqueness of each and every one, the author does not support identity politics which by promoting one group, fights for power and excludes others. It is the poor and the immigrants who are the ‘others’ of today’s politics – devoid of political and cultural recognition, trapped in) their identitarian revendications, the unemployed – forbidden to work, to make a living (imposed impossibility). Kristeva would like to invent politics which, as she says, ‘takes into account the uniqueness of each and every one, but does not abandon them to loneliness, but, on the contrary, offers generosity, recognition and forgiveness’.

Contemporary culture lacks discourse about weakness and “imposed impossibility”; it also is silent about suffering: “Suffering? It  is out of place except in novels about the third world. People have had enough of it here” , writes Kristeva on our society of the complacent spectacle. It is the Will for power over Opinion which rules when our condition consists in “renouncing Being and espousing the will to social power”.  Here Proust’s epic is revealing: the petty and xenophobic salon of the Verdurins, exemplifies for Kristeva the hunger for forming clans and controlling opinion. Madame Verdurin suffers from a horror of vita contemplativa and belongs to those “who move in society, simply because she needed the society of other people”.  Verdurin’s life is a game of being “admitted to so “select” a household”  as hers. The cult of reputation, hearsay, status, speaking on someone’s behalf or more often than not against, research into origins -  this is the cup of tea of “our set”.  Madame has no doubts who is and who is not one of “us”  and knows no generosity to the excluded. The Verdurinian fever of spectacular clubbiness characterizes also the postmodern social which equals journalism turned showbiz: “that’s our only dream: How to get in on it? How to occupy the TV screen even if only for a moment, or at least to get a few lines in the paper, in the best of all possible worlds, where messages talk about other messages and images transmit other messages.”  Kristeva critique of the self-referentiality of the pseudo-Leibnizian world runs parallel to that of Baudrillard and his portrayal of the abuse of the media and hyperreality (frequently misunderstood as an apology of the postmodern Baroque of technology), but she goes further than the French sociologist as she diagnoses that Being became reduced to society.

 The logic of belonging affects intellectual life which “cultivates and fossilizes […] divisions by excluding newcomers, rejecting intruders, and cherishing the members of the seraglio. Recognitions and adoptions can be determined through class, sex, or so-called taste (which usually proves to be an aesthetic or ideological complacency)”.  Inner life thus becomes shrunken and there is no public space of meeting, an in-between. In Kristeva’s interpretation the public would constitute the diversity of excentricities, idiosyncrasies confederated. Plural experiences of cultures correspond to processive subjectivity, which arguably underlies the notions of Erlebnis and Erfahrung in Hegel and Heidegger and constitutes the zone of being as opposed to belonging. It is perhaps not accidental that there is nothing more indefinite than the word culture  as indeterminacy and ambivalence is inscribed in the very term. Arendt refers to the  etymology of culture, to colere, ‘take care, tend, preserve, cultivate’  only to define culture as an ‘attitude of loving care’. Thus care, crucial in European philosophy from epimeleia to Sorge, combines in the writings of Arendt with love, which Kristeva continues in her call for a new polyphonic code of love in her study Histoires d’amour and in her speech at the Nobel Symposium in Stockholm. Let us also remember that in antiquity care is inseparable from the psyche: psyches epimeleia, although Foucault in his otherwise insightful chapter on the culture de soi  omits this aspect. The Greek care for the soul, Roman cultura animi as well as religious care for interiority returns in Freud’s Seelsorge; in opposition to culture-show, culture-ideology, culture-information, Kristeva postulates a culture of the plurality of experience which encompasses alterity and strangeness, even if and because its distinctive feature is not only charm and grace, but also – and first and foremost - the uncomfortable, das Unbehagen.
 
THE PUBLIC OF A COSMOPOLIS?

A possible remedy to the fall of the public may be searched for in Kantianism. In his work Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht , Kant defines the condition of subjectivity: the human being is constituted by ‘social asociality’ (die ungesellige Geselligkeit). Let us note the condensed oppositions joined in the oxymoron of Kant.  Duality and contradiction, an ‘antagonism’, as Kant himself writes,  is inscribed in subjectivity which does not conform to Aristotelian identity (hypokeimenon). The inner tension pushes us towards intersubjectivity and at the same time prevents from it; social, we tend towards others, but on the other hand, contradict our tendency (un-). Therefore the Kantian definition of the subject may be placed between the optimist ‘human sociability’ of Montesquieu and the belligerent pessimism of Hobbes.

Intersubjectivity is almost impossible: human being lives among others whom he cannot bear, and simultaneously, as Kant points out,  cannot do without.  Both Kant’s Ideen and Zum Ewigen Frieden  describe the condition of ‘bearing, suffering, enduring each other’, (neben einander dulden).  Let us remember the telling etymology of  toleration: tolerare, ‘bear, stand’ suffer, endure’; likewise, according to Kant the reciprocal process of dulden is ambiguous, plural: the negative and the positive element of life with others combined. Characteristically, more often than not one employs the verbs ‘bear’, ‘stand’ negatively: ‘I cannot stand them’ rather then ‘I stand them’; is this a sign of a dominant asociality? Consequently, we do not act hospitality to, if I may paraphrase Arendt’s thought, our fellow-guests of the world.  Zum ewigen Frieden postulates hospitality which Kant motivates by the spherical shape of the earth.

The very title of Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht is telling: the adjective weltbürgerlich is to be found here, ‘of the citizen of the world’, ‘cosmopolitan’. What is the titular  allgemeine Geschichte, ‘universal, general history’? Hannah Arendt argues that ‘the thought of progress in history as a whole, and for mankind as a whole, implies disregard of the particular and directing one’s attention, rather, to the ‘universal’ (as one finds it in the title itself of the ‘Idea of a Universal [General] History’) in whose context the particular makes sense’ . However, to my reading of Kant, at issue is an interaction of the singular and the universal, never the one without the other, never the one priorized over the other.  The combination of the particular and of the general follows the dialectic of ‘asocial sociality’ and stimulates creativity. It is here that taste - another phenomenon of dual character - develops. Taste is seen by Kant as the realm which is the most subjected to social consensus and, at the same time, as an intimate, individual territory.

 Kant projects his oxymoronic definition of subjectivity onto international relations when Ideen bring the postulate of establishing a Society of Nations (Foedus Amphictyonum).  This is a projected unprecedented reality of cosmopolitanism which in Kant’s opinion is difficult, mad, but inevitable.  Zum ewigen Frieden introduces the idea of a ius cosmopoliticum and of a federation, civitas gentium, of the globe. Here, however,  rather a preservation of differences than uniformization would be encouraged.  Differentiation is guaranteed by the plurality of languages and religions. According to Kant, a simultaneous political unification and a respect for differences would produce world peace.  The philosopher fuses the thought of Judaism, Christianity and the Enlightenment (a thesis put forward by Rickert), and in my view it is his cosmopolitanism which is a prime and valuable example of this synthesis.

 Kant, Arendt and Kristeva start with their conceptualization of equivocal subjectivity only to transpose the intrasubjective complexity onto politics. They propose an entry into world history without effacing human diversity: can one risk describing their idea as subjects-in-process join a cosmopolitan confederation of elementary republics. Even if I go too far in coupling the Jeffersonian system of wards celebrated by Arendt with supranationalism, we deal with projects which transgress unitary solutions or Derridean différance and may provide a remedy to dangerous extremisms. Would it be possible to retain here the concept of citizenship, moving away from its reduction to nation-state membership and returning to the Stoic ‘citizen of the universe’ and Kant’s ius cosmopoliticum?

In the homage to her teacher and friend, Karl Jaspers, Arendt puts a question mark after the term “citizen of the world” . She warns against centralized power over the globe. At the same time, however, she points to ‘a framework of universal mutual agreements, which eventually would lead into a world-wide federated structure’.  If the Arendtian councils confederated globally?

It is easier to theorize the abuses of citizenship than to propose a positive project of the open citizen of the world. However, pointing out to limitations is in itself an attempt of reform. A monological, identitarian citizenship based on nationality is out of the question not only when faced with postmodern hybridization, mestizaje or multiculturalism. On the other hand, the ‘cosmopolitan self’ of Jeremy Waldron is too much in the spirit of ‘anything goes’. In other words, whereas the national citizenship is not inclusive enough, the postmodern one is too inclusive. Why not opt for a compromise in the sense of the Kristevan third way of subject-in-process. Likewise, taking into account  human complexity, ambiguity and conflicts, democracy is heterogenous, processive, open-ended. Participatory or representative, it cannot be unitary; therefore a ‘system of representation should not be a pure expression of any single mode of trustee, interest, identity or any other form of representation’ .  Could a similarly plural idea of citizenship, not reduced to one identity, but flexible and open to change be founded?

Between the communitarian concept of citizenship  and an explosion of citizenship negation in postmodernism, I would place the postulate of Kant. A remarkable continuation of it is Habermas’s project of European civil society . It accentuates the role of the public opinion of communicative practices which would enable the formation of political will not only by governments, but also citizens. Defender of modernity against postmodernist attacks, Habermas, is only too right to plea for public opinion, product of the Enlightenment. Under communism public opinion did not exist or was restricted to underground, indeed private networking. In Eastern Europe it is alive and well several years after the transformation, but not in full swing yet. Nor is our ‘art of associating’ (Tocqueville). Even if public opinion is active, it confines itself to the national cause as these are the burning issues of our practically newly founded nation-states. There is not enough, if any, of a transnational public opinion in this region of Europe: it does not involve citizens nor does it prepare ground for forming our political will. But was it not this will and this restricted, private public opinion which - let us be cautious  - contributed to the fall of communism. With the absence of the enemy, it is hard to be a citizen: positive projects, including that of transnational civil society, do not arouse emotions.  Would such a civil society increase participation?  Public thinking together with others is Kantian indeed.

It is not commerce and economic interest which yield a transnational community utilitarian, but a Kantian proposal or even imperative of a ius cosmopoliticum. It would be tempting to reveal the history of ideas behind the concepts of ‘national identity’ versus cosmopolitanism, and of citizenship. Cosmopolitanism has roots in Biblical Prophets, Stoics, Paul, republique des lettres, and, as I insisted before, Kant. Religion discovers inner life and postulates ‘Love thy stranger’; the Prophets foretell Messianic reconciliation and peace. Stoicism with its emphasis on interiority constructs the idea of a ‘citizen of the universe’. The Enlightenment introduces human rights, at least theoretically universal, if they are not droits de l’homme et du citoyen.

The philosopher of multicultural Koenigsberg constructed his project of cosmopolitanism when the French Revolution gave birth to  the ‘Siamese brothers’: democracy and nation-state . It also generated socialism and nationalism; the latter, a Cain, killed his siblings, suppressing l’Etatique in the nation-state. Thus, the Revolution started with celebrating foreigners and finished with annihilating them. Le citoyen, inaugurated as a neutral and universal designation, an anti-title to all titles and divisions came to be identified with the Same, one of Us, kith and kin. Likewise the Soviet citizen, though officially internationalist, aimed at converting the world into his own nationalism, a combination of Western apology of economy and irrational monomania of expansion. The two revolutions had nothing in common with Kantian cosmopolitanism which dwelt on the autonomy of subjectivity. The French Revolution replaced subjectivity with an all-encompassing society while the Bolshevik one with productive forces, both constructs preached and put into practice militantly. The citizens’ sole function was to act as brothers or enemies of an abstract society, of les malhereux in whose name Robespierre ruled and whom he made even more unhappy or simply eliminated. Whereas the Soviet citizens were turned into means of production, the citizens of the Reich turned themselves by free elections into executors of ‘national will’ which demanded an exclusion of definite groups of fellow-citizens and an influx of those who passed the test of identity. Here again the very concept of identity showed its double face. Let us not forget that strict identity in citizenship was abused by totalitarian systems. It is not an accident that the Nazis deprived the Jews of their German citizenship

Moving away from the totalitarian praxis of Communist citizenship and drawing on Marxist theory, one can argue that in modernity citizenship emerged as a form of domination (rather than membership) which opposed and replaced subjection. One can note a hypertrophy of the subjects’ duties to the absolute monarchy here and similar proportions in modern citizenship. The subjects of a monarch, as Judith Shklar implies, may have been made secure and prosperous by granting all power onto their ruler. Even Nero, she adds sardonically, was dangerous only to his court. The era of ‘spiritualist’ citizeship followed. Are we not still in an age of this ‘spiritualist’ citizenship which Marx diagnosed: the idea of rights is not fully realized in contemporary liberal democracies, in particular economic rights are frequently neither formulated nor respected. It is never enough to remind about the unemployed and the homeless. Care for the ‘losers’ of market economy cannot but become the priority of both state institutions and civil society. The sick, the poor, the imprisoned are entitled to be helped by citizens. Likewise, the people deprived of political and civil rights, members of minorities who were denied citizenship, including Russians in the new nation-states.

The cosmopolitan project could not have been more sublime and beneficial, but ‘facts are stubborn things’. Our asociality makes us stick to the atavistic bonds of natio as if we took its etymology for real: belief in being born into a nation, nothing more natural than a nation. But nation is a product of history, a fairly recent construct which embodied in power and in education which perpetuates itself by ‘histories of national exploits in politics, literature, sciences’, etc.  In a struggle for survival, the nation-state does all to counter any unifying tendencies. National atomism is used by both the North and the South to conserve cultural and economic divisions when the North can continue its patronizing indifference and silent remote-control and the South can cultivate a national honour of  misery to be lived in dignity. What we experience is our own, that is, special, pure, right (Latin proprie, French propre) while theirs -and Fichte conceptualized it-  is the unnatural, strange, foul. East European last keepers of the nation-state oppose not only the inter-governmental integration initiatives, but also any attempts at a transnational civil society; hence suspicion and aggression towards international NGOs. At the same time, Eastern Europe suffers from an underdevelopment of local government; the citizen only witnesses, but does not participate as everybody is reluctant to join.

CITIZENS, HUMANS OR GROUPIES?
 
If I am not a citizen, am I not a human being? The question reconstructs the thought of Hannah Arendt who was speaking for the rights of stateless and ‘displaced persons’ a propos of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen whose formulations reserved the status of humanity for citizens. Thus the Declaration of 1789 remained in its historical moment of an emergent nationalism, but at the same time it contained an apositional, universal statement; such is the interpretation of a continuator of Arendt, another exile from totalitarianism, Julia Kristeva. In contrast to the tradition of Edmund Burke who accused the Declaration of abstractness and authored the dagger-scene in the House of Commons, she defends the formulation of human rights in the French Revolution and in general the Enlightenment against the Frankfurt and postmodernist accusations of its ideology as a generator of authoritarianism (Adorno and Horkheimer’s theses sharpened in postmodernist compilations). In the spirit of the Declaration human rights are not confined to one and only community, but belong to both citizens and strangers, ‘us’ and ‘them’ alike. In the instant of a ‘victory of the nation over the state’ (Arendt) then, an inclusion of each and every human being is implied. In the thought of the Enlightenment an intuition surfaces that our subjectivity is plural, equivocal and heterogeneous, and that it comprises alterity: the stranger is within me – thus the universalism of the Enlightenment mixes with the recognition of otherness. If we recognize ourselves as strangers, we appreciate the strangers around us, instead of persecuting and adapting them to the norms of our own repression.

A repressive communitarian spirit unforgiving towards uncanny others and oneself is thriving nowadays in Central Eastern Europe and in the United States alike. A monoculture seems to dominate what Milan Kundera called Mitteleuropa. The Holocaust and Communism put an end to multiculturalism, and after 1989 the ‘resurrected’ states invest in their mythic identity and monolithic ‘national spirit’. The Baltics, when independent, desire to build states of one and only nation which results in Russians being stripped of citizenship in Estonia. A number of postcommunist countries are filled with hatred towards their Roma population. The ‘young’ republics are then far from welcoming strangers – they fear their ‘purity’ may be soiled by an inclusion of others and excel in entrenching themselves against ‘foreign infections’. The United States is also marked by xenophobia and racism which culminate in the ideology of the militia movement. Often even liberal intellectuals do not hide hostility to cosmopolitan projects: witness the reaction to Martha C. Nussbaum’s For Love of Country. Debating the Limits of Patriotism..

Romanticism initiated a fascination with indigenous, national culture; authoritarianisms replaced the cult of the nation with the dictatorship of the party. As Hannah Arendt has it,  ‘After the nation during the nineteenth century ‘had stepped into the shoes of the absolute prince’’, it became, in the course of the twentieth century, the turn of the party to step into the shoes of the nation.’  Nowadays it is the turn of social groups. Their communitarian ideology continues the Leninist ideal: ‘who is not with us is against us’. Witness a party-like structure of some militant feminist and gay movements with the Politburo equipped with monopoly on decision-making and their hatred of the ‘mainstream’. Their activity is that of paramilitary force: actions, mobilization, campaigns. The paradox of gay propaganda consists in the claim that the ‘chosen’, the best and brightest are gay, everyone is gay, but needs an enlightenment provided by the movement to find out his true identity. The bellicose factions of feminists also delight in identity politics, bonding, belonging, closed, exclusivist community- demagoguery and actions. Both groups appropriate the idea of human rights, using it in the fight for the recognition and aggrandizement of their own community.
This leads to a clannishness, a compartmentalization in dealing with human rights.

It is important to analyze some of the feminist and queer revisions of culture, especially of the critique of the Western system of visual representation. For instance numerous feminist analysis insist that any representation of sexuality in our patriarchal society is by definition sexist, thus negative and degrading. For art history it means that every portrait of female body oppresses women and turns them into the passive objects of desire and gaze. Moreover feminist protest against equating women with the body has led to a suppression of corporeality and as Camille Paglia defined it to the desensualization and desexation of female identity. With remarkable intensity she attacks feminist critique of pornography and perceives it as a new and dangerous form of censorship. Feminist victimization of women and a similar whining over gays puts every bodily and sexual gesture that emerges in public sphere under suspicion and scrutiny. In other words, some movements of minorities has become a new form of puritanism that tends to control and eventually discipline the erotic side of human nature. Although social activism against hate crimes is necessary, we should recognize the totalitarian and surveillance-obsessed aspect of liberation movement.

The generation of Simone de Beauvoir was fighting for equality, that is, for the identity of women and men, much like the proletariat or rather its self-styled liberators, ‘intelligents’, were in manifestos and revolutions. For the following generation of feminists, such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, it is the recognition of difference that is at stake (identity of women against men), as they draw on the difference-ridden theory of the two Jacques: Lacan and Derrida. It is time now to postulate the appreciation of strangeness in oneself while the very concept of identity has come to be questioned. In the Kristevan project, for example, women are regarded as having ‘the good fortune and responsibility of being border subjects’ more dramatically than men: an in-between of body and thought, biology and language, nation and cosmopolitanism. According to Kristeva, it is not easy for them to restrain themselves from limiting their choice to only one of these areas, which would make them extremists, e.g. iron ladies of reactionary causes. In contrast to de Beauvoir, Kristeva sees a chance of development in motherhood which “circulates passion between life and death, self and other, culture and nature, singularity and ethics, narcissism and self-denial”. The apology of motherhood is rejected by militants who condemn Kristeva for her essentialism, phallogocentrism, and other –isms heretical to feminist orthodoxy.

If I do not consider my gender or sexual identity to be the only part of my subjectivity, am I a human being?, as so-called bisexual I am tempted to ask the members of identitarian movements. Human rights are caricatured in gay culture in the demand to enter the army or the police, that is, to join the most repressive structures of society. Indeed the activists claim to build ‘the queer nation’ with its flag, postage stamp, and ideology of excluding the ‘non-citizens’. More than a few movements of liberation are obsessed with power, power for ‘us’.

Although the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, in her General Assembly speech on the 50th Anniversary of signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights dismissed rhetoric of human rights in favour of deeds, it is indispensable to analyze the word of human rights to find out whether they should refer to community belonging or cherish individuality. According to Kristeva what matters is ‘keeping in force the universal, transnational principles of Humanity differentiated from the historical realities of nations and citizenship, means, on the one hand, the continuation of the Stoic and Augustinian legacy, and therefore the ancient and Christian cosmopolitanism, which finds its place among the most valuable points of our civilization; we have to go back to it and bring it up to date. But above all the keeping in force of universality, the symbolic dignity of all humanity, seems to me to be not only a form of defense against nationalist, regionalist and religious fragmentation, whose integrational efforts are currently very clearly visible.’  It seems that the introduction of idea of subjectivity into politics would alleviate the ‘expulsion from humanity’ (as Hannah Arendt wrote of the situation of refugees ) which is still suffered by individuals not necessarily coming from minority groups.

WHY THE UNITED STATES?

In opposition to identity set and stone, the trajectories and writings of Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva epitomize open and cosmopolitan subjectivity. In a century when nations and continents tend to fight each other, the two scholars-exiles adopt and adapt the Stoic idea of the cosmopolis: we are the inheritors of all traditions. As Arendt has it: ‘I am, as you know, a Jew, femini generis as you can see, born and educated in Germany as, no doubt, you can hear, and formed to a certain extent by eight long and rather happy years in France [... I] left Europe thirty-five years ago - by no means voluntarily - and then became a citizen of the United States, entirely and consciously voluntarily because the Republic was indeed a government of law and not of men.’  A stranger from behind the Iron Curtain, Kristeva settled in Paris only to decline the invitation of the University of Chicago to continue the research of René Girard there. However, since 1974 when she published her ‘D’Ithaca a New York’ in Promesse, Kristeva has written on America and lectured as Visiting Professor at Columbia. In a discussion between Philippe Sollers, Marcelin Pleynet and Kristeva entitled ‘Pourquoi les Etats-Unis?’ which appeared in the 71/72 issue of Tel Quel in 1977, she argues that polyvalence is a distinctive feature of American culture, which proves, however, highly ambivalent: ‘It can be said that this polyvalence, that is, the multiplicity of social, ethnic, cultural and sexual groups, of discourse - in brief, the multiplicity of subdivisions that are economic, cultural, political, artistic, and so on - ends up ‘ghettoizing’ the opposition)’ . In her 1993 Nations without Nationalism , Kristeva returns to the exploration of the American experience when arguing that polyvalence did not produce polyphony (her favourite concept derived from the literary criticism of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin) which could prevent America from xenophobia and racism. Despite federalism and postulates of multiculturalism, it is racism and xenophobia which dominate the United States. Polyphony is a prerequisite, but not a guarantee of a dialogue, not to mention a polylogue. Did the South converse with the North, the East with the West, does a WASP dialogue with a Jew, Afro-American or Hispanic culture with Asian? But a mosaic, a cultural intertextuality is in itself a value. Let us think of the spaces where a monoculture dominates: Central and Eastern Europe where the Holocaust tragically put an end to multiculturalism, the Baltics which when independent desired to build a state of one and only nation. A resentment towards the Russians resulted in their exclusion from citizenship. The ‘young’ states are then far from welcoming strangers. Investing in its mythic identity, inventing the tradition and monolithic expressions of a ‘national spirit’ they excel in entrenching themselves against foreign infections. Purity may be soiled by social evil supposed to have come from the outside: an alien pathology and decadence. But resentment is also strong in the United States although its (their?) ethnic polyvalent coupled with federalism did persevere against Nazism and Communism while welcoming the refugees from both totalitarianisms.

The US welcomed the victims of totalitarianism. However, from 1921 on, during and after the Second World war, the admittance of refugees came up against a quota system based on national belonging; as Alvin Johnson, president of the New School and founder of the University in Exile said: ‘America kept her doors closed except for a narrow chink, the quota system. There was a narrower chink, the non-quota visa. Ordained ministers and priests, university professors with regular appointments could enter irrespective of quotas, if an American university invited them if budgets allowed for it. The New School arranged 189 non-quota visas’ . However, it is the United States which literally guides the struggles against totalitarianisms and continued as a singular, albeit restricted haven for thought and art, banned elsewhere. As Arendt wrote in We, Refugees the community of European nations collapsed when its weakest member had been cursed; America, in contrast, did not fully open its door then, but did not remain indifferent, either. Restricting the number of immigrants nowadays while at the same time integrating special entrants (without all social benefits), continuing ghettoization and demanding ‘positive discrimination’ the problems of immigration seem to follow a painful dialectic. On account of the restrictions imposed on immigration in the 1920s, the proportion foreign-born in the total population of the United States declined steadily until it bottomed out in 1965 at a mere five percent, the lowest level since 1830 . American attitudes towards newcomers vary plainly from assimilationism to differentialism, from inclusion to exclusion. Whereas to Europeans the figure of the threatening invading other is invested in Islam, in the Arab nation, the equivalent phenomenon in the US is the English-Only movement in response to the spread of Spanish, as Aristide R. Zolberg and Long Litt Woon argue.  Developments of the last three decades constitute a departure from this baseline which the authors exemplify by the statement of a young lawyer and activist of the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund in Los Angeles, daughter of illegal migrant workers who has gone on to Harvard and Berkeley and says what a second-generation immigrant in Berlin or London could never say: ‘We (second-generation Mexican immigrants) also feel very strongly that we are American’.

 Let us return briefly to the founding of the American political experience; Hannah Arendt conceptualizes the differences between the American and the French Revolutions . Revolution as such typifies modernity which undergoes the crisis of a lack of the public sphere (conversely, the Greek ‘polis’, as idealized by Arendt, favours the public realm). As it is the case with Kristeva who in her recent study Le sens et le non-sens de la révolte and in her Nobel Symposium speech  views revolt in its etymological sense of a revival, Arendt equates revolution with a restoration of what is public. Likewise, in her recent book Kristeva traces the etymology of revolt to the primitive forms of *wel and *welu which indicate a voluntary act of protection and wrapping up and evolves towards the semantics of return, circular movement of planets, restitution, recovery. Hence, Kristeva’s concept of revolt, revolt against the current collapse of subjectivity, revolt as a reconstruction of memory and of sense. Arendt’s interpretation of revolution as reinstatement of the liberties of the public sphere, if not paradoxically a restoration.

In response to Burke, Thomas Paine calls the French and American Revolutions counterrevolutions, a definition which Arendt explicates as an epitome of the revolutionists’ idea of reversion, return, revival. Explicitly, she argues that Paine’s objective was to restore the original sense of revolution: when referring to its antonym, he reversed the current events of his time to a past, not a seventeenth-century imaginary state of nature, but a period of history before the submission. What Athens had been in miniature, America would be on a large scale. However, Paine’s rights of man had no historical reference to point out to and their novelty unsettled Burke and Paine alike. Everywhere Paine remained alien. Did he belong anywhere if not to a space of crises, process, revolt? His subjectivity and citizenship were without end, inconclusive, cosmopolitan. A Quaker or a deist of English origin, Paine participated by word and deed in the American Revolution. In turn, the French Republic elected the Anglo-American Thomas Paine to its National Convention.

Let us repeat after Arendt that in its first stage revolution fights economic and political oppression; this is where the French Revolution was brought to a standstill when abusing violence and destruction. By contrast, the American Revolution was based on the previously operating local self-governed bodies and, consequently, succeeded in establishing public institutions. Although the bourgeois ideology of economic activity separated Americans from politics, the public has remained a sphere of action and plurality in the United States.

Arendt’s and Kristeva’s theories of the revolution and of the public space find themselves in the middle of burning issues and topical debates. Between communitarianism and individualism, constructionism and essentialism, so-called left and right, conservatism and postmodernism, inner life and society of the spectacle in political pagentry or on the Internet. We diagnose lack of debating on the global or county level, deficit in representation not to mention participation, in-difference no care for the other or oneself, ban on differences, and instead a uniformization Coca-colonization. But with pop-culture, the motto ‘all men are born equal’ is exported, together with an insistence on human rights, although sometimes traded for Airbuses. This is the song of American diplomacy, including the cultural diplomacy: multiculturalism, feminism, a new mission of the U.S. satirized, but fortunately bought by the WASPs of the Second World, proud of its own moral majority. Will the U.S., the epitome of Fukuyama’s posthistory, continue a global policy or, as John Gray predicts, withdraw into regionalism because of its debt, ethnic violence and shift of power to Asia?

Hannah Arendt’s and Julia Kristeva’s is a cosmopolitanism coupled with a respect for singularity. The emphasis of the former scholar is put on the political thought of Thomas Jefferson who, by popular hearsay, advocated ‘humanitarian reforms’; indeed Arendt examines Jefferson’s proposal of ‘elementary republics’. Towards the end of her book On Revolution, the author criticizes party systems and opts for such small public organizations as ‘elementary republics’ which do not alienate the ruling from the ruled. The Arendtian idea of the councils is embedded in the Jewish tradition. Shlomo Avineri depicts the internal institutions of the Jewish communities in the Diaspora . In the midst of autocratic empires with no representation, self-governing structures appear: here belongs the Council of the Four Lands, the Jewish council held in Lublin.

In the United States citizenship has been democratic, but ‘only in principle’, as Judith Shklar argues. ‘The equality of political rights, which is the first mark of American citizenship, was proclaimed in the accepted presence of its absolute denial’ : black chattel slavery, servitude. Two objectives seem to be interiorized by Americans: on the one hand, concern for social standing, status, on the other hand, the democratic blessings; the two are, needless to say, incompatible’. This is a state of a double bind. In Britain (a thesis which T.H. Marshall puts forward) the civic and political rights came first to be supplemented by social rights . In the America of the 1930s with its progress in the social rights, the Blacks were still deprived of civic and political rights (they had them and lost them). Not only exclusion, marginalization, but also resentment on both sides increased: while the New Deal produced race divisions within social-democratic and supposedly universalist economic projects, the 60s with its eagerness to make up for decades of discrimination hurt the sense of justice of the Whites and did not improve the living conditions of the African-Americans .

An ideologization of the questions of identity - following Ira Katznelson’s diagnosis - is revealed: the voice of White, external racism mixes with the voice of Black, integral racism in a pathetic duo. Would one not indicate therapeutically a return to the values of universalist citizenship?, asks Katznelson  Yes, on condition that universalism is combined with a cultivation of singular subjectivity. But in the present society, with mounting social problems and positive discrimination, race is again a concept, dubious scientifically, embodied in identitarian belonging of violence. In his Philosophy of History Hegel enumerates the examples of Blacks who became clergymen, doctors, as an indicator of the future possibilities of the United States, a rare voice at that time on either side of the Atlantic. Preceding by several years Tocqueville’s diagnosis, Hegel states that ‘America is clearly the land of the future which is still in the process of becoming’ . Far from the quality of ‘becoming’, the emergent nation-states of Eastern Europe desire to build monolithic, exclusive, ethnic-obsessed Gemeinschaften rather than Gesellschaften and eschew cosmopolitan proposals. Eager to join continental structures of which they claim to have always been part and opposed to it for fear of losing an ‘identity’.

In “new democracies” singularity and differences are depreciated as Western fads of decadence. At the same time, both blocs of politicians and the mafia continue the violent politics of identity where they are more than certain who is with “us” and who is with the “guilty them”. There is less and less space for the cultivation of inner experience, the specialty of the unproductive forces, the lishnye l’udi (‘superfluous people’), the typically East European mark of the intelligentsia. And it is the philosophers and philologists who subscribe to identitarian movements to invent tradition, enemies, and the aim of an invincible Ruritania for Ruritarians. Nationalism is the driving force of new democracies, but it is not the only problem and not a problem, confined to new democracies; think of the militia in the US. If a villain must be found, let us acknowledge a totalitarian temptation which lurks in everyone of us. Potential totalitarianisms which concentrate radical evil, banality of evil (Arendt) or abject (Kristeva). Nowadays we witness or experience the mania of skinheads and depression of societies. Jefferson’s people-turned-wolves repeat in Kristeva’s depiction of contemporary Eastern Europe of crime: the land of the wolves. In the analysis of totalitarianism the projects of Arendt and Kristeva part, remaining complementary. ‘Vice is latent, dear Hannah Arendt’, writes Kristeva.
Parallel to the conceptualizations of subjectivity in monotheisms, the Founding Fathers of the U.S., Hegel, Shestov, Berdaev, but in particular - as we shall see - Kant, she emphasizes the tragic duality of the subject. As Arendt writes, in contrast to the French Revolutionaries, the Founding Fathers were well aware of human dualism. Let us reiterate the crucial question of our condition: how in spite of hating strangers, do business together?

A CRISIS TO REVIVE THE U.S. – “THE THREAT OF A STRANGER”
 
Who is Monica Lewinsky? The American media unleash two images of her: a femme fatale and an abused greenhorn. But behind these lurks a suspicion: with her ‘-sky’ name and exuberant conduct, Monica is a stranger. Lewinsky does not belong to the genteel, self-controlled, rational ‘us’, but as an external, alien infection, constitutes a threat to law and order, a menace to sanitized American politics.

Monica blazes with the energy of exotic sensuality: raven-haired and swarthy, thick-lipped with tons of diabolical lipstick. With her foreign, if not Gypsy mystique, she becomes an ominous Dark Lady. You can almost feel the musk-scented heat of the Bohemienne, glowing, drenched in perspiration. Photographs in the National Examiner depict her as a sultry dominatrix clad in a pitch-black dress with a necklace of pearls. Is she not an unmeltable Slav, ex-Soviet or a Jew. These ‘elements’ represent superstitious, backward, irrational force devoid of ‘internal conscience’ reserved for Protestants . No wonder that in unison with the Puritan prejudice, both the White militia and the extreme Black movement pigeonhole together Jews, Catholics and sexual minorities . Jewish or Catholic, Lewinsky with her uncanny erotic charm may be easily suspected of being an internationalist plotter, a cosmopolitan spy.

Elemental and savage Lewinsky challenges pure America. The Dark Lady poisons the purest of the purest, the White House. She is also out to stain other sanctuaries and according to the National Examiner invades the ‘prestigious Smithsonian Institute’ (the newspaper seems to mean the Institution) to ‘hunt for men’. The tabloid makes her part of bestiary as a ‘sex-crazed vixen’; she ‘who would stop at nothing to satisfy her insatiable lust’, to – and here the zoomorphization continues – ‘keep her claws’ in men . She is an animal man-eater, a preying mantis or just an immature nymphomaniac with her ‘oversexed teen’s scheme’. The National Examiner makes her part of bestiary as a ‘sex-crazed vixen’; she ‘who would stop at nothing to satisfy her insatiable lust’, to – and here the zoomorphization continues – ‘keep her claws’ in men . She is a man-eater, a praying mantis or just an immature nymphomaniac with her ‘oversexed teen’s scheme’. Monica’s ‘non-stop stalking’ - to continue with the revelations of the national examination – consists in hunts for technicians and handymen. But she wants power and plots to ‘get’ the supreme representative of the People, becomes one of his ‘clutches’, and eventually ‘graduates’ from his supposed seraglio.

THOU SHALT BE SPOTLESS, AMERICA!

The President of the United States is expected to be a superman, a shining example of respectability and propriety. He is to represent the pieties of ‘American values’ of honesty, self-restraint and cleanliness. The virulence of the affair of Clinton and Monica Lewinsky introduced a new quality here: the President, an icon of purity, revealed infatuation, passion, entanglement, dirt, in short, life.

But even the Southern boy had to restrict the eccentric spectacle in order to restore the hygiene of the operating theater of American politics. Clinton’s control of ejaculation stood for a desire to be in charge of the relationship, diminish it to an insignificant romance, hide and purify himself. The President did not want to commit himself or give the partner any indication of his sexual involvement. He was limiting his and her bliss because of the fear of unveiling this ‘improper behavior’. Restricting the sensuality, avoiding penetration, coitus interruptus makes the conduct a little more proper and acceptable. Although oral sex is illegal in some states, it constitutes – according to the President’s people - less compromising an act than copulation. As Marina Warner argues, in the Clintonian logic for the fellatee no sexual relationship exists because his penis is as if detached from the body . The self is not there, thinks the President, when oral sex is performed, the self functions only when he sends in the missiles – a mistakenly dualist concept of human being.

But the least complicated theory of human subjectivity is that advocated by Kenneth Starr. As Cynthia Ozick observes in The New Yorker about his report-narrative, the motivation there is one-dimensional. All the President wants is ‘fondling Lewinsky’, all that Monica does is ‘seeking Clinton’, all that Star says is invariably one obsessive sentence . The riches of personhood are reduced here to flat, stock characters, one identity set and stone. No one in the universe of Starr, including himself, has any inner life, dilemmas, dreams, hesitations. Everybody is a closed circuit of public function and boredom. Paradoxically, it is due to the cruel investigation that the human complexity comes back when Clinton is seen as ‘a suffering individual’(Bobbie Ann Mason) . Although they quote and praise the Founding Fathers profusely, men who inflict such an existential experience on Clinton, seem to have forgotten the Framers’ crucial lesson: the multiplicity of human nature . Plato and open versions of monotheisms expose the maze of man where good and evil, violence and benevolence, rationality and the body mingle. On the contrary, Calvinism, Puritanism assumed a perfectionist vision of human being and attempted to found a sanitized world. However, the Founding Fathers breached with their ancestors’ reductionism and – in contrast also to the optimist and dangerous visions of Rousseau and the French Revolution - realized human complexity. Kristeva captures it as legalism of the American Revolution versus terrorist populism of the French Revolution
 
THE SCARLET “A” AS IN ALEXIS

The Puritans of today do not want to admit the openness of the personality. Their monological view is perpetuated not only by the ‘Independent’ Counsel, but also seemingly more independent political commentators. The Washington Post quotes with horror the words of a citizen, a teacher, the favorite figure of panic-ridden polling: ‘There are very few values left’. The teacher citation ends a whining text by Richard Morin and David S. Broder with a title which matches the clumsiness of Starr’s subtitles: ‘Worries about Nation’s morals Test a Reluctance to Judge’. Here the social trends defined as ‘threatening’ which upset according to the duo of authors upset ‘many Americans’: alcoholism, sexual harassment, homelessness and – yes! - homosexuality . Although Morin and Broder attempt to hide their moralistic tone behind the ciphers of polling, they return to the nineteenth-century concept of sexual minority.

 It is Linda Tripp who turns out the most prim and proper of all. She saves the purity of America.  Now the supposed spy’s diaries, messages, thoughts are policed and exposed to the nation. The would-be Mata Hari is accused of destructive, sinister lust and of a scheme to jeopardize the world’s only omnipotent democracy. American kids are in danger as the plotting Lewinsky claims blood. An exaggerated blonde Mrs. Tripp denounces Miss Lewinsky to save the leader, to execute her patriotic duty. Apart from restoring national security, Linda desires to secure herself literary immortality and regal royalties by producing a tome to expose her ‘traitor’ friend. Repression of the other often comes from troubles with oneself, with the inner conflicted desires. In other words, we hate a stranger because we are strange ourselves . Don’t the contemporary purists attempt to normalize themselves when calling for the exorcisms of others?

And so the alien brunette finds friendship and perfidy in ‘one of us’, the bleached Linda who on the surface could not have been more friendly, homely, good. When the affair turns into a national soap opera, Monica’s persona parallels the obvious villain, Alexis, whilst Linda mimes the outward angel, Crystal. From the White Goddess, Circe and to la Belle Dame Sans Merci, the likes of Alexis and Monica are predictably monsters, against whom Crystals must fight to save the genteel world. But amongst the cultural associations, one is less jocular: the so-called ‘Lewinsky affair’ represents a Scarlet Letter of our own ‘dark times’. A scarlet ‘A’ on an ostracized and stigmatized Hester is repeated today. But will this ‘A’ turn into sense and beauty as was the case depicted in Hawthorne’s novel?
 
LIFE-SUPPORTING CRISIS
 
Let us think of a politics that is open to crisis. Crisis does not stop at destruction, but can be creative, promising, rewarding. Declines bring renovation, revival, new life. When Biblical prophets accuse Jerusalem of adultery and prostitution  (Joycean Whorusalamin), they hasten to add that the city of sin will be saved. Augustine, too, knows the whirls of evil and realizes that one does not reach the city of god without a spell in Babylon. These valorizations of crisis are not remembered by the pundits of American politics who are so fond of invoking both the prophets and the bishop of Hippo; the Founding Fathers’s vision of the perplexity of human nature, of man in perpetual crisis is also forgotten. The superman-to-be, the President is denied humanity and with him the whole body politic is disembodied.

The political should represent both rationality and sensuousness, a cross between ideas and body. It must not be empty discourse, but a living experience which does not rule out any sphere of humanity: a sanitized set of rules and maxims, but a slice-of-life cherishing of the diversity of our existence. The President could synthesize sense and senses, consensus and individual passions. Perhaps the present ‘affair’ and ‘fall’ will be of help here. Politics and subjectivities as critical becoming could make us more humane, both ‘us’ and strangers ‘so that the capital A might have been thought to mean Admirable’ . As the political is far from static, but finds itself in the making of ordeals, apocalypse, revivals – in creative crisis – there is still hope.

RIOTS OF FORGIVENESS

Shall we burn President Clinton? Shall we stone Monica Lewinsky? Latent Puritanism drives us to detect evil, to act it out or eliminate, but we have no word for it. The American way is to demand perfection, be unforgiving and not to allow human fragility. From Salem to Ku Klux Klan to McCarthyism to militia, forgiveness seems an un-American activity. In a number of states where death penalty is not only symbolically allowed on paper, but also executed in spite of well-grounded calls for pardon, forgiveness is forgotten.

Confronted with evil, American culture falls silent. Although it abounds in images of violence and death, a discourse on evil is lacking. Andrew Delbanco brands the situation - literally christens it - a ‘death of Satan’ in America. But one cannot pretend that only good exists and ban all that does not conform to ‘positive thinking’. New Age, a very American religion indeed, orders to look on the bright side whereas monotheisms and the American Enlightenment elaborate on both love and hate, ‘mutual promises’ and violence alike. Since there is evil, there is forgiveness, say the Prophets and the Founding Fathers, reminds Kristeva. Forgiveness undermines conventional logic and cuts the chain of cause and effect, crime and revenge, ‘eye for eye’. The alternative of forgiveness is rejected by fundamentalism, be it Puritanism, national Catholicism or Jihad, which has nothing to do with monotheisms except for the appropriated labels.

Drawing on the Christian understanding of forgiveness, Vladimir Jankelevitch, Paul Ricoeur and Julia Kristeva strive to introduce the notion into contemporary thought. Following the trinity of scholars, Jacques Derrida elaborates on forgiveness and alludes to the Judaic and Muslim concept of it. It so happened that I witnessed a debate hosted by the Cardozo School of Law where Derrida insisted on the purity as distinctive feature of the act of forgiveness: there is no forgiveness, argued the French philosopher, when you ask for it, when there are external motives for pardon. In my view, however, forgiveness is of an infinite potential and has nothing to do with purity: it is unceasingly in flux contrary to the static rationale behind retaliation. Granting pardon can be asked for or not, you may forgive for a variety of reasons. Only one thing is certain: with the mainstream forgetting themselves in witch-hunts, civil disobedience today is to forgive.

Andrew Delbanco restricts his exploration of a ‘death of Satan’ to America. But under our eyes Eastern Europe grapples with the issue of responsibility: many blame communism for all the possible wrongs and failures of today. The first Solidarity government of Mazowiecki proposed a policy of forgetting, marking a stroke of separation from the ambiguous past. Before long, however, Poles, abandoned this idea and cheerfully returned to the business of retaliation. Almost a decade after the fall of totalitarianism there are more and more calls throughout the post-communist countries for an intensification of screening public officials for past collaboration with the Security Police; this procedure is officially named ‘lustration’, which in practice departs far from its etymology of ‘ceremonial purification’ and evolves into a witch-hunt. Under the banner of lustration, the East European opposition, when in power, adopts the measures taken by its erstwhile antagonists: purges. Although President Havel repeats that under communism the line did not run clearly between the guilty ‘them’ and innocent ‘us’, but through each individual , lustration has already been conducted in the Czech Republic and is underway in Poland.

Another post-totalitarian society, that of South Africa, invented an alternative way of handling accountability: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Although it did not prove unproblematic, the post-apartheid transition revealed the evil on both sides and prevented bloody confrontation; perhaps the South African solution would be paradigmatic in building a posttraumatic society of toleration. But even if it is too premature to judge, forgiveness may play a vital role in politics. I have often wondered what stood behind the moment of insight - promptly gone - that made the Polish clergy announce: ‘We forgive and we ask for forgiveness’. With this phrase the bishops of Poland opened their letter to the German episcopate in 1966; the then communist and nationalist authorities hastened to condemn it and Polish-German resentment has all but disappeared so far. The lustration of today also shows how unscriptural and unforgiving Polish Catholicism is. But the symmetry of acknowledging mutual wrongs and reciprocity of benevolence in forgiving and asking for forgiveness is of prime import to contemporary polities in transition. Contrary to it, Estonia – when independent – desired to build a pure state of one and only nation where Russians were denied citizenship: they were to suffer revenge for the ills of the Soviet Empire. Even the logic of reprisal seems at a loss here and vexing questions arise: why do the Baltics identify Russians with the Soviet system, is the rationale behind it to cleanse their own participation with another totalitarianism?

In an ‘old democracy’ resentments also surface in the indignant surprise over revelations about one of the Founding Fathers. Breaking news across the U.S. confirms the oral history of the sage of Monticello. DNA testing reveals a national scandal: the African-American descendants of Thomas Jefferson. A Founding Father not only fathered an out-of-wedlock offspring, but he did so by one of his Black slave. A one-day protege of Jefferson, James Callender, described in a tabloid style his relationship with - what the journalist called her – ‘African Venus’. A leading Jefferson scholar of our day similarly called this liaison ‘vulgar’. Sex police proves to have been on guard throughout American history. Today from the pulpits of politicians, self-styled priests of purity, accusations of President Clinton’s privacy are being blindly cast. The wrath of parochial gods.
 What America needs today is forgiveness. Instead of a spirit of retaliation in investigations, hearings, impeachments, censures, let us think of a way to set ourselves free, relieve, reconcile. Otherwise we are going to continue to be, as a New York Times headline goes, ‘Bored, Dispirited, Disgusted’ . It is time to realize that one can never attain perfection because our human condition contains multitudes of innocence and experience, foulness and benevolence, ‘American values’ and the uncanny. Once we acknowledge our fragile complexity and our own evil ‘beam’, we would be more inclined to forgive the frailties of the President. Why expect Clinton – even if he subscribes to the rigorous, albeit charismatic, community of Baptists - to be a superman? In his own medial fashion Clinton attempts to mend his image of an evangelical Protestant. He joins the community of a predominantly Black church in Baltimore where on this occasion the pastor preaches quite an un-American dogma that although one is flawed, one is blessed . Clinton also sends a letter to his home Immanuel church in Little Rock: ‘The President expressed repentance for his actions, sadness for the consequence of his sin on his family, friends and church family, and asked forgiveness from Immanuel’ . Importantly, Clinton contributes to the painful and frequently interrupted by violence and reprisal talks of forgiveness and peace in Ireland and Israel. Luckily for Americans and for the so-called international community, he does not, however, believe in a possibility of a heaven on earth, which precludes totalitarian temptations typical of utopists. For the time being, why don’t we put the pseudo-spiritual trials of our neighbors’ private life aside and revel in the economic base which is thus far in full swing? Before a global crash hits this country.

THE UNFORGIVING NEW WORLD ORDER

Is it exclusively the malignancy of others that holds the President hostage? Hasn’t Clinton fall victim to his self-righteousness?: his denials, sophistry, the ‘third way’ of dismantling the welfare system and a simultaneous lip service to those in need. The President’s foreign policy is also marked by sanctimoniousness as if the only incorruptible of the earth disciplines and punishes the villains of the Third World. In this logic, the administration does not trouble to continue diplomacy with Iraq. The culture of hate triumphs in the global triumvirate: the President-the American anti-Clintonites-Saddam.

In an almost abrasive tone Julia Kristeva depicted the beginning of the U.S. – Iraq conflict; was it a war of values, a Huntingtonian clash of civilizations? “[T]he cohesion of the American nation centered in the Dollar and God keeps troubling those for whom the future of men and women is centered in other values. The fierce struggle for profits, a war as holy in Washington as it is in Baghdad but in the name of another god and with incomparable humanitarian precautions (since the Rights of Man imposes certain duties): are those truly “national values” the entire world, other “nations”, “ethnicities”, and “origins” must submit to?”  Kristeva portrays “a dictator straight out of the medieval Inquisition” versus “a liberal” who  “answers him in the tones of a Victorian puritan, while the common people cry out for peace.’   Here Kristeva addresses directly and without a Proustian distance public affairs and power politics; her critique is not cloaked, but expressed aggressively and with an ironic wit.

Since the time Kristeva commented on the American experience, it has acquired a new actor: Kenneth Starr whom  Harold Bloom rightly designated as Polonius on the outside and Iago on the inside. As I have mentioned, the characters of his vitriolic report are flat. Ken Star, the confessor of the most boring version of the fixed identity of hypokeimenon, is after the postmodern President who asks after Pilate what aletheia is and after deconstructionists ‘what is means’. In reality, Clinton has a tragic flaw: hubris. Apart from private if televised acts of contrition, he does not admit a particle of guilt, any error of his policy or conduct. A pinch of self-doubt, of self-skepticism would not hurt; it would oppose the culture of hate and build an alternative, uncomfortable culture (das Unbehagen), a necessary discontent which Freud prescribed.

Bill Clinton is not capable of identifying himself with those who fall from grace. It takes courage and generosity to do so, an attitude of  ‘we forgive and we ask for forgiveness’ on which we have written in an earlier essay a propos of the Polish Episcopate’s formula in the ‘German question’. It is remarkable what Adam Michnik has to say of the Bishops’ letter to Daniel Cohn-Bendit: ‘I think that it was a just, intelligent, and clear-sighted gesture. But I didn’t understand it at all at the time. […] When I went to Germany Heinrich Boll told me that reading that letter made him believe that Christ would rise again’ . Michnik himself developed an identification and a defense of the accused, putting himself in the place of the ostracized, a confession of the Kristevan inner uncanny: ‘anyone who commits himself to the Communists will suffer the same fate [defeat]. I am telling you this because I myself am blood of their blood and flesh of their flesh’ .

A witch-hunting followed the reunification of Germany. The spirit of retaliation reduced humanity to a simple ‘0-1’ logic, to ‘faith in files’. As a victim of this ‘McCarthyism’, Christa Wolf, says: ‘in Germany, ‘overcoming the past’ on the public level usually takes the form of a chronicle of scandals or a mere skimming of documents – documents that reduce people’s personal histories to simple patterns of yes or no, black or white, guilty or innocent, and provide no information beyond that. […]I shall not forget, nor do I want to forget, the physical sensation of being replaced, piece by piece and limb by limb, by another person who was built to suit the media, and seeing an empty place arise at the spot where I ‘really’ was’ . But in the middle of the witch-hunt, somebody like Michnik, somebody who was capable of going well beyond self-righteousness, spoke. So Juergen Habermas: ‘I can well imagine, and I have been thinking this since November 1989, that if by chance I had not grown up in the Rhineland but had found myself in 1945 living east of the Elbe instead, I would have identified myself with the antifascism of the returning Communists and would have become a Party member and begun a career; and because this is a hypothetical case, no one can say today when and where that career would have ended.’

The quality of identification with and defense of the accused is lacking in the President. But it does not mean that he should be hated, humbled, persecuted. Or that anyone should be. In the unforgiving and for now eternal triangle of the world police-the sex police-the nation police, can we only forget the Arendtian theme of forgiveness?

BETWEEN ITHACA AND SOFIA

Eastern Europe now is also a land of passive citizens. But depressions on a large scale characterize not only this part of the world whilst mania has infected nationalist skinheads. Perhaps the militia in the United States suffers from the same mania. Although an International of skinheads seems impossible, the symptoms are the same, and even more dangerous in megalomaniacal ‘suit-clad skinheads’ (as Guenter Grass ahs it) or in heels (as Kristeva would hasten to add). East European nationalisms and Stalinist rage over cosmopolites, made the very word ‘cosmopolitan’ ironic, if not derogatory. Dialogue, abused in 1989, lost its meaning, too, not to mention community, reserved for religious orders. As these words-ideas cannot be replaced, it is important to revive their sense. The semantics of a dialogical community of citizens of the world is to be seen against the background of philosophy and put into practice. How to combine then a world integration with the rise of smaller and smaller communities of ‘invented tradition’, patrias chicas. Consider my tiny multicultural city of Lublin between Poland and the Ukraine - is easier for a minor city in the middle of a backward rural area on the fringes of Europe to side with Euro-enthusiasts or to commit ethnic cleansing? A minor city of two universities where academics are necessarily pro-Europe: many defend an ‘endangered Polish identity’ as, in general, university no longer follows a cosmopolitan idea of the university, typical of the Middle Ages. Education was made the locomotive of nationalism. The nineteenth century reduced research in Europe, an in particular in non-existent Poland, and shifted the emphasis on teaching the ‘docile bodies’ of citizens of a nation-state (an imaginary and as such more powerful in the case of Poland) in the one and only spirit. What will become of a puzzle of diversity without and a consciousness of a diversity within, a polylogic inner life?

Coming from the ‘Other Europe’ Kristeva stands against a ‘Fortress Europe’ and would join Habermas in an advocacy of the welfare state on a supranational level with – in her terminology - a public realm of generosity. More than the Frankfurt philosopher, she insists, however, on cultivating the inner experience. It is important to supplement the concepts of identitarian membership (nationality, citizenship) with the notion of universal subjecthood and put it into practice . Any membership would be then a matter of Renanian daily plebiscite. If only citizenship were to be determined by choice then and not by blood or soil. Here Selbstgesetzgebung joins the Stoic cosmopolitanism. To accomplish their unending synthesis, we need to go through a process of open and public dialogue. In becoming world citizens, we have a chance to activate our citizenship. In crisis and because of its crisis, citizenship may serve us to care for ourselves and others. As heterogeneous subjects, we are doomed to and we desire to continue politics. For the time being, we are outside wars, militia threats, famine or hate attacks, but for how long? In order to survive and to help others survive we are in need of a caring subjectivity-in-process within the public sphere which may be warranted by a Stoic or Kantian citizenship of the world which would not neglect diversity and interiority rather than by an inveterate national membership.

FROM POETICS TO POLITICS AND BACK AGAIN
 
An urgent need of our age is a public realm which would cherish subjectivity. Totalitarianism was, as Richard J. Bernstein has it, an attempt to make “human beings in their distinctness, uniqueness, and plurality […] superfluous”  and in his view today “there is the real possibility that the concept of humanity can be eradicated” . Julia Kristeva returns to the concept of intra- and intersubjectivity, dynamizing, opening and setting it in process. In contrast to the staticity of the subject of unity and to postmodern finitism, it is variabilism and the infinite which characterize the Kristevan anthropology. Equivocal, polyphonic, inclusive subjectivities follow a polylogic. To resist the totalitarian temptation, we actualize in cherishing the uncanny within ourselves and in others.

In Kristeva’s theory the public sphere would be constituted as confederation of strangenesses where hospitality, generosity, forgiveness are practiced. As she develops the admonitions of Hannah Arendt, the social admits sameness exclusively; it is the zone of membership, togetherness, clique, hatred towards those who are not “us”. Kristeva stresses the plurality of civil society which does not freeze into an inveterate identity and is to “valorize and guarantee everyone’s “customs” and “manners””. Our strangenesses find themselves in a public confederation with the private uncanniness of others to form the space of welcome for the subject. The Kristevan project would like us to be closer to being, although it is impossible and improbable to choose between the bliss of Being ('la jouissance de l'Etre') and the spectacle of belonging; what is important is that both modalities should be compared, questioned, analysed. Kristeva advocates a distance between every belonging: to be at the centre and on the periphery of clans; what fill us with optimism is the fact that belonging relies more and more heavily on the agreement of the person joining: the old idea of becoming a member through one's origins - as Habermas has noticed - is changing in favour of free choice. A Polish-American writer, Maria Kuncewicz, struggling for Nansen passports during the Second World War destined for such displaced persons as herself, endeavoured  to make a reality of world citizenship which, as Habermas phrases it, ‘has ceased to be merely a phantom’ .

To contrast Kristevan theory with the trends that dwell exclusively on belonging, let us trace the designations of monolithic subjects and how they are conveyed into homogeneous intersubjective relations. The Latin individuum renders the Greek atomos, ‘indivisible’ and is to be transfered onto la nation une et indivisible. Prosopon and persona, ‘mask’, ‘character’, person of the` verb form’ indicate sealed and inflexible subjectivity, permanent self (what am I?), literally ‘a social role’. This is a subject reduced to belonging.

The sameness and closing at intra- and interpersonal level are a distinctive feature of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy Wissenschaftslehre. Homogeneous and hermetic “I” posits itself in repeated acts (Tathandlungen). This is a self-identital “ego”: the proposition “I am I” as “unconditionally and absolutely valid” . The absolute Ich is countered by the absolute “Not-I”. The model of the opposition of “I” and “Not-I” is conveyed by Fichte onto intersubjectivity where the “very own” is identified with what is “natural” and the “foreign” equals “artificial”. A violent clash of Ich and “Not-I” (Anstoss) where the Fichtean subject deifies himself and burns in the acts of going beyond .

Fichte developed the categorical imperative “beyond and against Kant”  while Kantian thought, contrary to what Berlin says , is not a source of nationalism, but of cosmopolitanism. However, one may overinterpret autonomy – as did Fichte – and propound autarchy; hence the postulate of Der geschlossene Handelsstaat. As Friedrich Meinencke indicates affirmatively, and Golo Mann with horror, Fichte moved from cosmopolitanism to nationalism . From the right of the ego to the might of the nation, the only true and original nation in the corrupt world being the German one. Isaiah Berlin argues that a straight road led from Fichtean philosophy to Romantic chauvinism of German historians. Nazism, too, abused it when the phrases of Fichte entered the Lingua Tertii Imperii. It was not a matter of a reception of the ideas of the philosopher, but a case of agitprop which culminated in the title of Alfred Rosenberg’s work, Fichte im besten Sinne einer der Unseren.

The subject in the interpretation of communitarians obligatorily selects one and only one identity. Although Charles Taylor admits his debt to the Bakhtinian dialogical principle, he retains the traditional concept of identity, albeit immersed in a dialogue  with community: ‘my own identity critically depends on my dialogical relations with others’ . The private and the public alike are subordinated to community belonging. Here Taylor seems not to follow Bakhhtin, but Rousseau: “Il faut une volonté UNE!”. Communitarians are far from admitting the other within oneself, an alterity-within-subjectivity which Arendt and Kristeva disclose. Nor do philosophers of dialogue or postmodernists a la Rorty or Bauman who propose solidarity of ‘aliens next door’ while ignoring the inner alien and intrasubjective conflict. Not only in his Warsaw debate with Habermas and Gellner, does Rorty express his nostalgia for a Whitmanesque epic of America. Moreover, he makes the word ethnos a decisive part of his vocabulary - ethnos rather than humanity: not a discovery of my own diversity, but a naive description of ‘the inclusion among ‘us’ of the family in the next cave, then of the tribe across the river, then of the tribal confederation beyond the mountains, then of the unbelievers beyond the seas’ . To Arendt and Kristeva, it is the American Enlightenment which is a crucial point of reference while Rorty’s vocabulary is that of American Romanticism, although he himself would view his legacy as pragmatist, American pragmatist.

 It is a philosophical novel of the Enlightenment, such as the perverse Neveu and not a nationalist epic. Artistic experience mixes sense and sensuality and as I  remarked in the case of Proust stands betwixt and between. Apart from art which challenges frozen identities, Kristeva reveals the potential of openness in Judaism, Stoicism, Christianity, and allies with Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, Arendt - political projects which Parmenides would accuse of two-headedness and Derrida of logocentrism. The Eleatic who did not tolerate the marriages of contraries dubbed Heraclitus  ‘two-headed’. After Heraclitus attempts at confederating unity and multiplicity were made by Stoics that at the same time dreamt of the citizen of the world. This third way is followed by the advocates of compromise, including Kristeva; her synthesis does not lead to monocentrism nor to antiphallogocentric dissens. Etymologically, compromise is mutual promise – to switch into the language of Arendt, Kristeva’s project promises hospitality to the fellow-guests to the world.

Kristeva’s political philosophy of strangeness eludes easy classification. Thus far she has been  recognized as a literary critic, feminist, psychoanalyst, critical theorist. Yet she is also, and first of all, a political philosopher of a - by definition - less-than-solid democracy, civil society in flux, polity in constant transition. The macrocosm of the public mirrors the fragility of subjectivity in the making. As crisis is inscribed in the individual - and this is a creative crisis – politics also dwells on crisis which is at the same time fall and revival. Accordingly, Kristeva’s is a challenging voice when confronted with the debates over multiculturalism, globalization, immigration, citizenship and ‘Culture Wars’ in Eastern Europe and in the United States alike. The current crisis will perhaps found a public sphere where subjectivity isvalued. It  is our fragility which is a condition for  a  plethora  of selves, inner and outer  experiences,  and  last  but  not  least cherishing my - that is your – singularity in the public. This is made  possible  if and only if we have a right to choose our belongings:  sexual  and symbolic ones, and avoid the firmness of our choices. Then a an ununiforming cosmopolitanism  is  at least our  state  of  mind   with   a   space   for the peculiar plurality of being.

A spacious, open-ended theory which does not count contradictions out corresponds with the inclusivity of the novel.The strange, paradoxal, subjective (!) novel goes beyond conventional logic and axiology and cherishes the subject’s inwardness – the polyphony of polyphonies in the protagonist, author and reader. It is not accidental then that Kristeva’s debut was the introduction of the thought of Bakhtin to the West and that thus fas she has authored three novels. Her scholarly project is also embedded in the novelistic openness, which plies reason with what has been deemed as the opposite of it and banished from science. Kristeva makes scholarship flexible in order to embrace episteme and odxa alike, both the Englightenment and its Counter: this is the driving force behind her explorations of plural logoi, poetic language, in particular experimental writing, mysticism, uncanniness in politics. Hence her two-faced track of a scholar and a novelist. As a dubious regional patriot, I would risk to ask whether her East European origin played any role in the mind-set of Kristeva?:  a Mitteleuropa which, as Milan Kundera has it, used to embody the maximum of diversity on the minimum of space. This is the locale of the parochial and, at the same time, universal novel that is conscious of the complexity of the subject, totalitarian temptation, the condition of the outsider. Through her cultural suspension, which she valorizes, Kristeva is indigenous in my part of the continent and foreign at once, passionately interested in things East European (as her novels testify) and distanced from them. She admits that the subject-in-process par excellence is not only the Neveu, but also the open-ended protagonist of Witold Gombrowicz; her philosophy runs parallel to the Polish novelist-longtime exile’s glorification of immaturity. Confronted with crisis, the novel-like Kristevan scholarship cherishes the creative crisis of the subject. If I may simple-mindedly travest the perverse novelistic formula, the theory of Kristeva is an unlight novel about unlight being.

Experience as connection to being is the key to Julia Kristeva's political philosophy. It is experience which, according to the author's recent works, broadens the inner space of the subject, which in our times is disappearing: experience is therefore a historical necessity - Erlebnis bursting in a flash, becoming recognition, the patient knowledge of Erfahrung; they find themselves in the dynamic of the subject and allow for the co-presence with the plethora of Being. Kristeva advanced this theory at the Nobel Symposium in Stockholm, once again dwelling on the concept of subjectivity in Hegel and Heidegger. Indeed, if anyone continues the explorations of the former in open politics  and of the latter from Identitaet und Differenz, it is Kristeva: a development of Lichtung des sich verhuellend Verschliessenden is the plural subject-in-process-of-strangeness rather than strict belonging or facile differance. In her essay, for the first time in thirty years addressed to Bulgarian readers, Kristeva writes: “Men and women on the border, unclassifiable, cosmopolitan, among whom I count myself, represent as part of the pulse of the modern world the survival of lost values thanks to, or perhaps despite, the influx of immigration and metissage. […They are] new existences from blood and language, not rooted in any language or in any blood, diplomats of the dictionary, the Wandering Jews of Being, who oppose authentic, that is fighting citizens by choosing wandering humanity.”