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Tom is often understood allegorically. But he resists allegorical clarity or harmonious thematizing. He is more akin to what Levinas calls the “strangeness of the Other,” a being “absolutely foreign.” But this does not connote existential freedom. Rather, Tom suffers the burden of being an allegory tout court, without the clarifying dependence or origin or ideology that would explain his presence. There always remain things to be accounted for—a remainder that speaks for unfinished history, counterfactual possibilities, and the pathos of particularity.

In Seneca's Hercules, the tragic protagonist has been displaced into a form of space which no one else shares. His time is not their time, either, for his act endures impervious to the motions of change and decay which are the rhythms of the ordinary world. The case of Hercules exemplifies a mode of estrangement which seems to be characteristic of tragedy, a movement of translation and of decomposition. This book explores the ways in which tragedy effects radical forms of estrangement by translating the protagonist into modes of time, space, and language which are alienated from those forms of time, space, and language which, in the different imaginations of different societies, constitute the human home. In this new world, metaphor, tense, and syntax forget their habitual ways of establishing identity or likeness, the sequence of cause and effect, and the distinction between agent and patient. The plays chosen for discussion range from Aeschylus' Agamemnon to Jean Racine's Phèdre, from classical Greek drama to its reworking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

How does the embodied imagination relate to the Stranger in terms of hospitality or hostility? What exactly do “embodied imaginaries” of hospitality and hostility entail and how do they operate in language, psychology and social interrelations (including xenophobia and genocide)? And what are the topical implications of these questions for an ethical practice of tolerance and peace? The essays which follow offer subtle and refined attention to the many Strangers — human, divine, animal and other — who appear, disappear or refuse to appear at all. This volume is divided into four parts. Part I interrogates hospitality as a liminal phenomenon: the relation of hospitality to place, the experience of borders, thresholds, frontiers, and portals. Part II explores the dramatic ambivalence at the heart of human encounters with a radical alterity we might call “sacred strangeness.” Part III considers the Stranger who finds us not-at-home, literally or figuratively, in our place, language or history. Part IV addresses critical implications of the work of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida.

This chapter turns to liminal experiences, this time of “things at the edge of the world.” It reposes Martin Heidegger's question, What is a “thing”? Phenomenologically revealed, things open worlds and worlds within worlds. Through a “productive strangeness,” things at the edge of the world serve as sites that permit reversals and transformations. The chapter suggests we would perhaps do better to think of ourselves as involved in an event with these strange, other-than-human faces. After dismantling our paradigm of “things,” it moves on to provocatively address our presuppositions about the animal and human other. It also proposes an ethics of what it calls “fractalterity” that might emerge through such reversals and estrangements; this would be an ethos that safeguards strangeness. Finally, it addresses the neglected question of hospitality to others such as animals and purportedly “inanimate” objects, and asks when we legitimately, justly attribute a soul, a psyche, an interiority to the “thing.”.

Among the most promising-seeming possibilities for an ethics linked to theology is that of regarding the world as sacramental. A sacramental sensibility seems, potentially at least, a way to a valuing of some aspects of the world, but not a way particularly welcoming of the strange or the stranger. But fundamental to such a sensibility, this chapter argues, is a discipline of attention, of a carefully open listening, and such an attentiveness in fact requires that we listen to what we do not already understand, what sounds in our ears and appears to our eyes as something foreign. This chapter presents an account of a sacramental ethics that is always hospitable to the strange. Drawing on various texts from Augustine, Lewis Mackey, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean Chrétien, and others, it narrates a history of the sacramental in Christian intellectual history. It advocates “listening” as a primary method of hospitality, a radical openness to the strangeness of the world in its all its beautiful, destitute, and bizarre incarnations.

Martin Heidegger's discussion of conscience in Division 2 is the most interesting moment in Being and Time. This chapter attempts to show where the ice floe of fundamental ontology begins to crack, for it is there that the questions of the uncanny and the stranger will begin to make themselves heard. At stake will be bringing the human being face to face with its uncanniness, with the utter strangeness of being human: we are the null basis-being of a nullity, a double zero suspended between two nothings. This chapter shows what Heidegger means by guilt, which is something closer to lack in the Lacanian sense or indebtedness than moral guilt or culpability. It rereads the elusive discussion of the “call” of conscience in Division 2 of Heidegger's Being and Time. It demonstrates that when Dasein finds itself, sich befindet, amidst this uncanniness, Dasein hears the stranger voice, die fremde Stimme. Dasein is paradoxically no place: in the gap between two nothings.

How are we to understand hospitality? What can phenomenology tell us about welcoming the stranger? When the “stranger” in question morphs into the “uncanny,” it takes on a weirdness that the uncanny itself suggests. For the layman, the word suggests a feeling of dread or inexplicable strangeness, seeming to have a preternatural cause, as if locked into the present by some ominous and long forgotten past. This chapter examines the key questions and method introduced by Martin Heidegger through Being and Time, and points to an alternative reading of the notion of guilt. This alternative depends on subtly different translations of “Nichtigkeit” and “Unheimlichkeit,” but also on a careful hermeneutic reinvestigation of Sophocles's Antigone and Heidegger's interpretation of that play. Paradigm of a paradox experienced by all human beings, Antigone arrives at the home, the hearth, only to be uncannily not at home. By attending to the textual unfolding of “uncanniness” and “homeliness,” this chapter refigures our understanding of both the play and Heidegger.

This chapter looks at racial imagery in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in the final years of the nineteenth century, comparing the illustrations of Indians and African Americans as a way of explaining the shifting nature of race and representation as Western expansion ran its course. Native Americans were usually portrayed more sympathetically than African Americans. Indians were also depicted as more progressive than blacks. Moreover, Indians in the early 1890s were seen predominately as nonthreatening, both militarily and culturally. African Americans, by contrast, were closer and more familiar to whites and often perceived as less interesting to illustrators and more threatening to the status quo. Unlike Indians, whose apparent strangeness could be presented as exotic, black strangeness was ridiculed.

Part IV collects further inquiries in the phenomenology of innovation, picking up and discussing relevant issues raised by the two extended field studies. A major argument is that practices are self-contained mediated worlds. When a new medium comes about, practitioners are pushed to reweave the texture of the practice within the new medium. They must cope with strangeness and make sense of the practice in the new medium. The different sections of Part IV have the character of ‘theoretical drills’ that deepen the book’s major themes concerning shifting practices. They touch on topics like the idea of mediation, medium specificity, the medium-object-representation triad, transient knowledge, transiency vs durability. Further insights on the practice of innovation are discussed, related to practices as mediated worlds, knowing as making, bricolage, assemblages, the elusive ontology of versioning, the paradox of the untouched ruin, to end up with dross, the dark side of innovation.

Chapter 6 examines the main ways in which ‘England’ is imagined within and around the English folk resurgence. Beginning with a survey of the imaginations of England historically associated with the folk arts, it identifies five dominant, and overlapping, constructions of Englishness circulating through the contemporary English folk arts. First is England as rural idyll. Secondly, there is England as a patchwork of distinctively local places. Thirdly, there is a discourse that presents the English folk arts through a notion of ‘strangeness’, as an exotic other at the heart of England. Fourthly, there is a strand that directly associates folk with an urban, cosmopolitan idea of England. Finally there is an idea of ‘authentic England’ in which folk is positioned alongside hand craftedness as an authetic response to the commercialisation and globalisation of culture.

The conclusion considers how repetition has shaped the structures of commonness and strangeness through which we have come to know our current era. Rejecting repetition, it turns instead to what Gertrude Stein called “insistence”––whereby each repetition transforms and is transformed by the form and context of its presentation. Repetition can come to be seen differently when approached through the rhetorical strategies of continuous reframing—the poetics of insistence and encounter—explored here: Yang Lian’s superimposition and constellation, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s co-response, Lyn Hejinian’s everyday estrangement, Bei Dao’s allegory and echo, Dmitri Prigov’s intersecting iterations, and Charles Bernstein’s affective immediacy and distancing artifice. When seen through the cross-cultural encounters and poetries wrought by the passage from the Cold War world to our current era of globalization, history appears not as repeated waves of influence, of sameness and dif¬ference, but as insistence across space and time, language and culture.

This chapter interprets Kant's conception of courage and its implications for contemporary political thinking. The chapter begins by examining Kant's reflections on courage in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the 1784 essay on Enlightenment, and the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The chapter then considers how contemporary political theorists inflect Kantian courage as apology, jurisprudence, and critique. Finally, the chapter argues that the Enlightenment ethos ought to combine the activities of defence, legislation, and transgression.

This paper argues that doing history of philosophy is not the same as making philosophical use of history. The difference between both is not one of anachronism or presentism, but both approaches have different objects of interest and a different methodology. It argues that history of philosophy should take historiography seriously and should answer the disciplinary demands of history. It inquires into the philosophical interest and relevance of history of philosophy, arguing for the relevance of a genealogical method. The genealogical approach answers both those interested in the sameness of history and those that look into the strangeness of history.

This chapter examines the presence of the trope of exodus in Jewish and African American children's literature, ranging from echoes of exodus in Jewish immigration stories to African American texts on the Middle Passage and slavery. It first considers questions about history, suffering, and speech by offering a reading of Julius Lester's The Old African before moving to a discussion of the intersections between exodus tropes and archetypal American narratives, including the pilgrim story, cowboys, and treks to the western prairies. It then explores issues of leadership, Moses, and Miriam in Jewish and African American lore and how Jews and African Americans are figured together in narratives of suffering and escape. The chapter shows that crossing is a place of agreement and consensus because all Americans (except Native Americans) had to journey here in the past few centuries, and that exodus is the means through which minority groups engage with the ideas of crossing, strangeness, and covenant.

Moving on to Arthur Symons poetry, chapter 4 argues that in Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) the fragmented, impressionistic sensations and images of the city mirror the poet’s fragmented consciousness and state of mind. The city is a matrix of darkness and light that limits and specialises the art of gazing. Through their impressionistic lens, Symons’s speakers are flâneurs that perceive the phantasmagorias of London, or Paris, from new angles and perspectives. The city becomes a gigantic textual tangle of artificiality that invites deciphering. In this sense, the female figures populating it with their masks of make-up and dress are textual enigmas. The sexual encounter within private quarters, or the constellation of dancers in the music hall, becomes a mirror of the city exterior.