| Chapter : | Introduction |
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With this state of affairs, the key term in Psychoanalysis, difference, is understood in its full signification. We are different from ourselves and within ourselves. Engaged with a reality we imagine we know, we become foreigners in our own country, inhabited by a stranger who is, at the same time, us and not us. This is the premise from which Julia Kristeva builds her theory of the stranger within the subject in Strangers to Ourselves (1989), where she invites the subject to recognise its own “uncanny strangeness”:
In a Catch 22 situation, the very definition of culture is what brings about dissatisfaction, the loss of the real, and our own grotesque outlandishness, in so far as it is impossible to inhabit culture by nature, there is nothing natural in culture, as Jacques Derrida argues in Monolingualism of the Other (1996) and Jeanette Winterson summarises by poetically describing “[l]ife” as “a foreign language” (The Passion 34).
The subject which springs from the notion that living in culture is living in a kind of constant exile is the subject of poststructuralism: “neither unified, nor an origin, and…thus a far cry from the unique individual who has traditionally represented humanity in the Free West” (Belsey Poststructuralism 65). In absolute opposition to the Cartesian cogito and the coherent subject it proposes, poststructuralism understands consciousness as “an effect of signification” (Belsey Poststructuralism 66). In other words, we are not what we think, in every sense of the sentence, by which “[t]he free individual is no longer either individual nor free” (Belsey Poststructuralism 66).5
It is in the work of Michel Foucault that the poststructuralist postulates of the plurality of meaning and the contingent nature of subjectivity are incorporated within a theory of discursive power.