Nations without nationalism

Kristeva, Julia. (1993). (Trans. by Leon Roudiez). New York: Colombia University Press.

Translator's introduction (ix-x11)
Roudiez reads the notions of strangeness and otherness and a feeling of difference in Kristeva's work. He notes the merge of the notions of "strange" and "other" in her book "Stranger to Ourselves", stating, "the final emphasis is on the stranger within, the other within the same" (xii).

[This compassion seems necessary for her to understand others free from the constraints of nationalism, which she describes as a defensive hatred against others. ]

What of Tomorrow's Nation? (pp. 1-47)
Kristeva describes that the values crisis and the fragmentation of individuals has caused a loss of identity and as a result, leading them to the cult of national origins. According to Kreiteva, it is the most massive, regressive and common denominator. Kristeva states, "the cult of origin is a hate reaction, " expressing hatred to others who do not share the same origins as well as hatred toward oneself that undervalues one's own quality and freedom.

Observing a recent immigration tendency, Kristeva asks the following question:

[T]he assimilation drive of the new migrants emphasizes above all the desire to enjoy social benefits and does not at all involve giving up their own typical, behavioral, religious, cultural, or even linguistic features. What sort of common life and what degree of mixing remain possible under such conditions? (p. 8)

Examining the immigration history of the United States, Kristeva points out that American nationalism has established hierarchies within itself such that it accepts immigrants by creating a special entrant status on the fringes of the law and without that immigrant enjoying all social benefits.

Stating her own position as cosmopolitan, Kristeva states her own perspective:

I maintain that in the contemporary world, shaken up by national fundamentalism on the one hand and the intensive demands of immigration on the other, the fact of belonging to a set is a matter of choice. (pp. 16-17)

Kristeva sharply points out a brutal persecution of foreigners in the name of nationalism in the French Enlightenment, for instance, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that maintained the distinction between human beings and citizen. Opposing to a nationalist, regionalist, and religious fragmentation that has aroused hatred and violence and destroyed humanities, Kristeva calls for universality for the rights of man, or a symbolic dignity of the humankind. In order to achieve the universality, she maintains, it is necessary that we "recognize ourselves as strange in order better to appreciate the foreigners outside us instead of striving to bend them to the norms of our own repression" (p. 29).

For Kristeva, recognition of our own strangeness and otherness is required for understanding foreigners. What does she mean by strangeness of oneself? Roudiez describes the strangeness in the sense that people live apart in their own rituals and fight among themselves.

As to feminism and nationalism, Kristeva maintains a little strange perspective:

Considerable watchfulness is thus needed in order to ward off that too facile symbiosis between nationalism and, if not "feminism," at least a certain conformist "materialism" that lies dormant in every one of us and can turn women into accomplices of religious fundamentalisms and mystical nationalisms as they were of the Nazi mirage.

According to Kristeva, the French nationalism is far from the spirit of the people. She writes:

The French national idea, which draws its inspiration from the Enlightenment and is embodies in the French Republic, is achieved in a legal and political pact between free and equal individuals. (p. 40)

Besides its contractual quality, Kristeva characterizes the French national idea with transitional and cultural aspects. By transitional, Kristeva is in tune with Bhabha's temporality. She states that the nation is characterized with a series of differences and thus demands particular rights be highlighted; therefore the nation is open-ended. Looking at this contractural, transitional and cultural nation, Kristeva calls for the right of foreigners to be integrated as a participation to this nation.


The Nation and the Word (pp. 65-76)
Kristeva asserts that the political became concretized during the twentieth century in the idea of nation. She further notes that de Gaulle, in particular, achieved it through his powerful use of the symbolic to appeal public opinion amid the world wars and other conflicts. She states:

By means of worshiping the Nation as a living and evolutionary unit and by anchoring his action on people's conscience in the radiance of the Word that gives access to each one's unconscious: de Gaulle has succeeded where the paranoid falls. (pp. 69)

Kristeva rephrases the formation of the national discourse as follows:

There you have a President who is conceiver and strategist of the national discourse, who creates realities by means of symbols while avoiding the pitfalls of tyranny and modifying circumstances for the good of an increasingly enlarged community, having in mind the interests of its members. (p. 75)

According to Kristeva, now is the time to revisit the nationalism in order to facilitate integration inside and outside of its borders. Here she, as a declared cosmopolitan, suggests that we force political discourse to move away from national constraints, recognizing others, and to build the bond among human beings.