The Question of the Foreigner

Derrida opens Of Hospitality by repeating the phrase “the question of the foreigner.” In his characteristic style, he repeats the phrase, lending emphasis on different words in the phrase in order to draw out its many connotations. These terms have much to say about transnational literature as well as the security of national boundaries. Here are a few of the different meanings that “the question of the foreigner” can have:

The question of the foreigner

---the questions that the foreigner asks the native. Why do you do this thing this way ? Why do you have this habit? The foreigner questions in an anthropological way, his attempt to understand a different society opens up implications that society could be different. The foreigner’s questions challenges the organization of society, the conventions which govern it. The question suggests an alternative way of doing things, a different practice. It suggests that things do not need to be this one way. They could be very different. The cement of society softens in the face of this question. The question does not need to be hostile to have this effect, it could be playful, slightly innocent even, a naïve asking, rarely though does it have the simplicity of a child, who usually receives a definitive answer from the educating adult, whereas the foreigner is given a more cautious answer.

---the problem of the foreigner. Perhaps in relation to the first questions of the foreigner, the native answers by challenging the legitimacy of the foreigner to belong, to visit, to exist here. The “problem” of the foreigner immediately posits an answer, to ask the question suggests a hostility, a suspicion , a distinction between we, who discuss the question, and those who are questioned. To raise the question is to assume a position of security outside the question. The question identifies you as not foreign. To ask about the Jewish question in the nineteenth century, or the Palestinian question today, or the immigrant question is to speak from the somewhere outside the question’s object. The questioner is not within the question.

---to interrogate the foreigner. The question of the foreigner serves to answer his question with another. Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here? This question reveals a concern that the foreigner brings trouble, that a potential disaster follows the foreigner, has motivated the foreigner to arrive upon our shores. Is he here to steal from us or to bring secret violence? Oedipus at Colonus, is the foreigner cursed? Does he bring a god’s wrath with him? Is he Orestes? Doe she carry a bomb in the form of a plague or something in his shoe? The Greek scapegoat was once as threatening as a refugee terrorist might seem to us. We have not gotten beyond superstitious fear.

---to doubt about the foreigner –does the foreigner even exist as a full person any more? What being has the foreigner lost by leaving his home? Is the state of foreignness a diminishment of being? Does the foreigner have less weight, credibility, currency (to use Paul Simon’s phrase)?

--the overall question of being, which the foreigner raises? To exist as a refugee is to wonder about the security of existence. The grounding of humans’ being becomes less certain by being foreign. This questioning does not necessarily lead to a loss of significance: for we can ask whether the foreigner is weaker than the native or stronger? Is the foreigner a helpless supplicant, or a worldly traveler, or a trickster sophist, come to sell us his story. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country has a more complicated relationship with his native land.