The Strangeness of the Foreigner
To undertake a phenomenological approach of the foreigner is to engage in the choice of describing what is indescribable. This difficult seizure of another’s strangeness is explained by the difficulty of finding data rigid in space and time for its description. It is an inherent issue to the human being in general, because the identity, that is to say, what singularises the other or constitutes its specificity, escapes any analysis. It is always under construction. The unchanging otherness of any subject is non-synthesizable. Hence, the idea of making an indirect mode of phenomenological description in order to grasp in the foreigner what his strangeness is or his irreducible asymmetry. Acceptance of the foreigner’s own freedom allows the other or the self/ego to live with him. Whatever the figure of the foreigner, living together is favored by the development of an ethics of encounter that encourages the integration of this one with his otherness or its transcendence and not the development of communautarism which can bring rivalry between communities.