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The Internal Other: The Uncanny Stranger within and at Nation's Margin

Sungran Cho 1

1경희대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

The encounter with the uncanny brings an unsettling recognition of the subject's own strangeness. With the Freudian notion of the unconscious, the involution of the strange in the psyche integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same. And this difficult recognition of the irreconcilable alterity within the self--the internal other--is precisely what enables a non-violent relation to the other outside. In other words, the ethical encounter with the external other in the political arena--with the foreigner and the stranger--is inconceivable without the acknowledgement of alterity inscribed already within the most intimate interiority of the self. Although the uncanny is not equivalent to ethics, therefore, in so far as it reconciles us with the irreconcilable within ourselves, it opens the possibility of ethics, ethical being with the other.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.