Panic! at the Div School: The Distant Other and our Problem with Pluralism
Growing up in the rural South, I didn’t exactly have many opportunities to interact with people who weren't Protestants. In my hyper-charismatic upbringing, I remember being taught that Catholics were not truly Christians, but were rather dangerous idolaters, a belief that I held even into my first year of college. In high school, following several years of spiritual wandering and rigorous study, I found myself back in the comfortable certainty of Southern Baptist fundamentalism (albeit with a Reformed-ish flair). Thirsty for some semblance of security, I remember reading every apologetics book that I could get my hands on, memorizing every argument for the superiority of the Christian faith above all others. Living in such a homogeneous environment, I found little pushback in my convictions, and even garnered praise for being an avid “defender of the faith.” This all radially changed during one summer of my life, where I was confronted with the reality of the Other for the first time.
Converting the Lost: The Distant Other from a Fundamentalist Perspective
In 2011, I was invited to participate in a statewide summer program in NC called Governor’s School. Essentially, it is a program that allows students to grow in their passions and intellectual/social capacities through a variety of seminars, classes, and social events. While I was there specifically for English with a concentration in poetry, everyone took classes in philosophy, theory, and ethics. We were introduced to complex systems of thought and theories that are not typically taught at a high school level, and although we were all anxiety-ridden dorks, that summer was one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life.
It was also here that, as a virulent and zealous apologist in training, I also encountered actual atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc. for the first time in my life. No longer were these systems of thought confined to the biased, straw-manned pages of Christian apologetics, but were rather living and breathing in the bodies of the people that surrounded me. While I never rejected or outrightly treated others as inferior, I was convinced by my conservative theology that it was my responsibility to save others from the torments of an eternity in Hell. Since I was always conflict-averse, if I could not convert the Other, then I would resign myself to letting them live as they are, hoping that the seeds of salvation had at least been planted by my words and actions. At first, I admit, I was a bit of a jerk. "Finally," I thought to myself, "a chance to apply all of the apologetics I’ve learned and work to convince people that Christianity is the most rational system of belief!" I told you I was a dorky kid.
I remember sitting in the cafeteria of Meredith College, arguing with one of my newly-met Hindu friends over the nature of truth, debating whether it was relative or absolute. I remember lying in the grass of the quad, debating with one of my atheist friends over the existence of God. I remember having the audacity and faux-confidence to volunteer to teach a seminar on Christian apologetics and incorporating it into every discussion of ethics and metaphysics. I remember using now-cringy phrases and rhyming schemes that I adopted from other Christian poets to spread the Gospel through the oh-so-woke medium of performing slam poetry at the weekly open mics.
Yet, I also remember a friend confiding in me that she looked up to me, crying because she felt alienated from her faith but comforted by my passion and assurance. I remember those late nights talking with a floormate, delving into the trauma of his spiritual past and offering him, if nothing else, a listening ear for him to process his pain and hurt. I remember being approached after my poetry performances by friends from all religious backgrounds, as they gave me constructive feedback and encouragement on my pieces. The contours of religious experience are always multilayered and complex, especially as you honestly consider both the positive and negative consequences of your actions, no matter how naive and foolish they may seem to you in hindsight. Just as it would be shortsighted to blindly praise my behavior during this time of my life, it would also be foolish to wholly dismiss them as the religious fervor of a new, zealous convert.
Despite all my failings and shortcomings during this brief summer, I came away with a radically different perspective of the Other. No longer were atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. the simple caricatures of my apologetics books, but were rather complex, sincere, vibrant human beings. I quickly learned a sense of humility, realizing that the shape and forms of religious experiences were immeasurably expansive, encompassing an infinite multitude of beliefs and behaviors. I found that, far from being a source of anxiety, the diversity of my surroundings was something to be cherished and treasured. When I’m in an environment in which the people around me have vast and disparate worldviews, I am challenged in my convictions and forced to confront the difficulties of not only my own beliefs but also how I can be an active and compassionate listener to the person in front of me. Instead of distancing myself from the Other, by embracing them, I can discover what it means to become a more whole and compassionate human.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?: The Distant Other from a Liberal-Tolerant Perspective
This conviction stuck with me throughout my college years as I slowly deconstructed my own religious beliefs, and I became increasingly interested in how we believe and how our beliefs affect the world around us. As such, when looking for a graduate program in religious studies, one of my primary criteria included the importance of diversity. Visiting various campuses, I was immediately struck by one in particular, where they claimed to emphasize “practice just as much as theory.” Championing itself as a non-sectarian school, the program advertised itself as a place where all religious traditions could come together and learn side by side. It was a place where pluralism was championed, where we can challenge one another and grow in our understanding by living and learning together in proximity.
To a degree, this proved to be true. One of the greatest strengths of my graduate school alma mater is its incredible array of brilliant, diverse voices within the student body. I am indebted to many peers and professors, both in my specific program and those who are outside of it, for their wisdom and insight. There are so many people there that I respect and intimately trust, as we rode the tumultuous waves of graduate school and the broken system of academia together. Some of us, across religious and cultural divides, managed to form close and lasting bonds between one another as we stood together in solidarity to tackle deep-seated issues side by side. During my time there, I did indeed make friends with and learned so much from my peers from a wide array of religious beliefs. That much is undoubtedly true.
Yet, the program’s marketing pitch sold only a half-truth: While the grad school sold a utopian vision of religious solidarity, it was more often than not marked by an undercurrent of shallow ideological tolerance. Instead of religious scholars communing and living side by side in their differences, I watched as we retreated to our comfortable cliques, often delineated by sectarian religious lines. I observed as friends and peers became more and more afraid of speaking out against the cultural ethos of the university, in fear that their dissent would cause alienation and derision. This was further exacerbated by the broken nature of academia, where the fear of losing a potential letter of recommendation threatens to stifle anyone who might otherwise radically challenge the status quo.
For example, although we claimed to be learning and growing from the Other, I can count on one hand how many times someone asked me what I believed. This was the taboo question that was always averted by any means necessary. We could, of course, briefly label our own particular religious belief with the common descriptors of “Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddist, atheist, etc,” but when it came to the particular claims of these traditions, we tended to become much more squeamish and nondescript. When it comes to belief, it can be difficult to recognize how we rely on others to believe on our behalf. As a psychological shortcut, we as humans tend to defer and project our beliefs onto a particularized Other (ex. using the phrase, “well, I’m Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Buddhist/atheist/etc, therefore I believe x, y, and z”), thus absolving us of our responsibility for owning our faith. From priests praying on our behalf to Buddhist prayer wheels, we often outsource our own belief onto an externalized Other. We pay homage to the superego injunction of the Big Other (aka. what we feel we “should” do) in both conservative and liberal theological spaces, whether it takes the form of relying on the faith of others within a hierarchical leadership or participating in ritual and liturgy that, in a sense, believes in our behalf.
This allows us to create an ironic distance from a system of belief, in which we see ourselves as practitioners of a tradition where no one actually believes what is being said. Instead, the belief exists virtually, only sustained by proxy of an imagined Other (be it a priest, pastor, political figure, etc) who believes on our behalf. Like the canned laughter of TV sitcoms, in which the audience laughs on our behalf (and we feel the subsequent relief of such laughter, even if we do not participate), we tend to do the same thing with our religious beliefs, projecting our anxieties and internal antagonisms onto an imaginary Other who handles these antagonisms for us. Thus, on the one hand, we can then safely retreat into the confines of our particular religious identity, confident that what could be critiqued is directed at the system of belief as a whole, and not the individual who holds them (ie. us). Yet, to build any unified sense of solidarity, we also need a universal language to describe our experiences without feeling the pangs of alienation.
Who Could Ever Understand?: The Failure of Identity and the Need for A Universal Politic
As a non-sectarian school, my graduate program struggled with a scattered sense of identity. In its attempt to appease everyone, the program often fell short in providing resources that address the specific rituals and complexities of our various faith traditions. As such, if your faith diverged from a theologically liberal, typically mainline Protestant expression, it was often necessary to supplement the course material with outside instruction in the specific rituals and complexities of one’s specific faith traditions. Yet, in order to bring students from different religions together in common study, an ideological center of gravity had to be established to project a sense of unity. This ideology in my graduate program was the language of liberal-tolerant identitarianism. Yet, by its very nature, identitarianism tends to fall woefully short of creating a universalized political movement.
During my time in graduate school, verbal ideological disagreements were often deferred through the utilization of one’s own experiences, which proved to be unassailable and protected from all interrogation and scrutiny. Many of us would weaponize our own unique identities as a way to anticipate and minimize any potential criticism without realizing that the very basis of identitarianism is a tool for the propagation of capitalist interests. While we claimed to be a wholly non-sectarian school, we more often than not divided ourselves into sectarian groups dictated by our own constructed, marginalized identities. To be sure, having groups in which we share commonalities is far from being harmful or bad in themselves. Rather, it is when we become comfortable in these groups to the point in which we only exist and navigate ourselves within these echo-chambers devoid of difference that we become increasingly hostile and polarized toward one another.
Furthermore, as I’ve written before, we must be attentive to how we tend to construct identities around a shared source of trauma. Forming communities of like-minded people who share a common source of suffering can indeed be cathartic and often creates a strong sense of community. This can, however, cause such a community to become fixated at the source of trauma without finding meaningful ways of moving beyond it, falsely believing that suffering in itself cultivates virtue. These communities also can be unaware of how other, external forces can make their way in and wreak havoc. For example, activism and social justice issues are indeed important and noble pursuits, but we must also be attentive to how these activities have also been co-opted by capitalistic interests to maintain the status quo. We should not make the mistake of thinking that our group’s inclusion within the capitalist market is equal to liberation. In our political moment, it can be all too easy to essentialize our identities, believing that just because someone looks like us (direct representation), then they will think like us and ultimately serve our best interest (substantive representation). This form of trickle-down representation mirrors its economic equivalent in its failure to address the systemic issues of the marginalized working class, being content instead with empty symbolic gestures.
Furthermore, in our current economic world of mass industrialization, we are so estranged from our labor that one of the ways in which we cope with our individualization is to form identity-centered associations that serve as a release valve for our angst. These particularist identities can all too easily be utilized to reshape and neutralize universal working-class demands. Thus, our unconscious need to cling to our autonomously-determined identity as a primary source of meaning often allows capitalism to continue to thrive through an economic crisis (as the economic collapses of 1929 and 2008 all too clearly show). Our subsequent necessity to continuously add ever-narrower niches of identity shows us the failure of identitarianism to truly be a unifying source of emancipatory politics. We thus become so deeply entrenched in particularist identities that we begin to alienate ourselves from one another, believing that the Other could never understand our suffering or live in solidarity with us. Gatekeeping the Other from entering into dialogues centered on identity will not keep the Other from making their resentment heard when they are mobilized to the voting booths, regardless of whether that resentment is justified. Instead, by emphasizing the ways in which our common struggles are intertwined with one another across identities, we can begin to build a true community of unity and solidarity.
Growing up in the rural South, while I may have been sheltered from religious differences, I was constantly confronted with the reality of overt racism, systemic poverty, and classism, the latter of which often made me an outsider within the elite Ivy League institution I navigated within during graduate school. Identity politics has the habit of erasing class distinctions, failing to realize that direct representation, while appealing on a surface level, primarily serves the interests of those with greater social and economic capital. Thus, we elect leaders with the same underlying oppressive ideology with different, perhaps more diverse, faces. Identitarianism always thrives when capitalism is at a peak crisis, simplifying complex problems, essentializing identity, and drawing causal relationships between specific groups of people and the problems in society. Accordingly, throughout our time in graduate school, I noticed how we constantly alienated ourselves from one another, preferring to dwell in the comfort of our particular life experiences rather than to do the more difficult work of synthesizing them into a universal, forward-moving political force.
In graduate school, under the banner of inclusion and tolerance, we also disavowed our particularism only when we allowed ourselves to shrink back from taking responsibility for the strangeness and exclusive claims of our faith traditions, preferring instead to subscribe to a repressive-universalized, humanistic ideological system that allowed us to transform our deeply rooted religious traditions into nothing more than vaguely secularized, toothless moralizations. Instead of challenging one another in our convictions, we often retreated to the comfort of deferring our own beliefs onto others within our traditions. Despite my desire to encounter others exactly where they were, I observed how we, even at a prestigious graduate institution, often distanced ourselves from one another, using cultural particularism as a mask for authenticity and vulnerability and religious universalism as a way to avoid meaningful antagonism and conflict. If we are to truly come together as a united religious community, we must discover that our universal struggle will only be found in the gaps and fissures of our particular identities. At the very point that our identity fails to capture our complex inner world is the exact site of resistance that can be utilized as a truly revolutionary force for universal, emancipatory change.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?*: (*Terms and Conditions Apply)
In the book of Luke, Jesus of Nazareth is confronted by an expert in the law with a question: If I am to love my neighbor as myself to obtain eternal life, then who exactly qualifies as my neighbor? Jesus, in typical Rabbinical fashion, answers this question by posing a parable. A Jewish man is walking down the road and is assaulted by a band of thieves, as they strip him of his possessions and clothes, leaving him on half-dead the road. A priest and a Levite pass by the man, fearing to touch him due to the man’s liminal status as “unclean.” Yet, a Samaritan, who would have been considered a blasphemer and enemy of the Jews, found him, bandaged his wounds (“pouring on oil and wine”), took him to an inn, and paid for his recovery expenses. Jesus points out to the expert in the law that if you want to inherit eternal life, then you must love the undesirable one. As Jewish scholar, Amy Jill-Levine writes, “The parable offers...a vision of life rather than death. It evokes 2 Chronicles 28, which recounts how the prophet Oded convinced the Samaritans to aid their Judean captives. It insists that enemies can prove to be neighbors, that compassion has no boundaries, and that judging people on the basis of their religion or ethnicity will leave us dying in a ditch” (‘Biblical Views: The Many Faces of the Good Samaritan—Most Wrong,’ Biblical Archaeology Review 38:1, January/February 2012). This is the move of “ethical extravagance” (to borrow a term from Terry Eagleton), in which the neighbor is the one towards whom you give freely and without restraint, which is more often than not an impossible demand.
By contrast, in the liberal-tolerant attitude, we tend to distance ourselves from the Other by adopting a phobia of over-proximity. In this perspective of bare tolerance, my neighbor is only my neighbor as long as they do not disturb or bother me. In this mode of living, as long as we can agree on the liberal politics between us, then we see little need to discuss how our religious traditions come into conflict with one another. In spite of being open and respectful toward the Other, we are also simultaneously defined by our compulsive fear of confrontation and harassment. Yet, what we fail to realize that, while it’s easy to advocate for a society in which we’re all maintaining order by holding hands and superficially advocating for the trendiest causes, it is only through the messiness of constructive conflict that growth and understanding can occur.
In a similar vein, we must also resist the temptation to essentialize our own group identities as fixed and static. In our enamorment with particularism, we can often get caught in the fundamentalist trap of believing that historically contingent and constructed identities are homogenized and seen as essential to the construction of a social group as a whole. We in the West have historically had the nasty habit of viewing other cultures as wholly fixed, to be eradicated or converted, while portraying ourselves as flexible, ever-changing entities. According to Zizek, “The basic opposition on which the entire liberal vision relies is that between those who are ruled by culture, totally determined by a lifeworld into which they are born, and those who merely ‘enjoy’ their culture, who are elevated above it, free to choose it” (Violence, 142). Instead of our traditions existing as the social binding of a collective, they instead become the markers of private, individualized identity.
Thus, we are then caught in a fundamental tension: we are caught between the violence of our collective systems of belief upon the Other and our inability to, in a sense, “see beyond” our historically-contingent positionality and thus take responsibility for such violence, forever deferring it onto an obscene Other within our tradition. While we are often aware that our own identity is fluid and ever-changing, we often do not extend this same sense of flexibility and contingency to our neighbors. The neighbor is this often misaligned and treated as a static object, while we see ourselves as free, conscious beings that are uninhibited by contingent social and historical realities.
We see this tendency incredibly well in our current neoliberal social moment, where many well-intentioned white folks pretend that we live in a post-racial society, insisting that racism doesn’t exist (after all, we’re all the ‘human race,’ right?). This view is ultimately myopic in that it refuses to recognize the real ways in which different communities face distinct, systemic issues within our society. If we pretend that we’re all the same, then we turn a blind eye to the unique ways in which our neighbor experiences suffering, unable to recognize how we might be able to address these underlying issues. Yet, we must also be careful to not let such differences separate us wholly from the Other, believing that they cannot ever have solidarity with us. Just because someone doesn’t understand our experience doesn’t make them an enemy. We might have radically different experiences and beliefs, but that does not mean that the Other is unworthy of love. In short, by emphasizing the differences between us, we turn the Other into a caricature. But by ignoring these differences, we simply turn the Other into a reflection of ourselves.
Confronting the Impenetrable Other & Our Problem with Pluralism
While in my fundamentalism at Governor’s School, I distanced the Other by objectifying the Other through gross caricature, my colleagues and I also distanced ourselves from the Other at Divinity School by cultivating a social fabric defined by alienation, which simultaneously enabled a culture of narcissistic tolerance. In this latter construction, we can interact with others, but we must obey and behave by certain, unspoken rules which forbid us from knowing the Other’s inner life. Thus we come to the central problem with our utilization of pluralistic principles.
During my tenure at graduate school, I worked at a local non-profit organization that seeks to foster interfaith dialogue and understanding across religious divides. Their work and vision is one in which I still wholeheartedly support and stand by, and their approach to pluralism still shapes much of my work. I remember coming back to North Carolina over winter break after I got the job. I excitedly shared with a group of friends that I worked for an organization that promoted religious pluralism. One of my friends asked, “What is pluralism?” Her fiancé quickly retorted, sardonically answering the question on my behalf, “Oh, that’s where they believe that all religions are the same.” This was a common conservative response that I often received from my peers back home, but I remember at that moment how I was surprised by how similar it sounded to my liberal friends back in grad school. There is the belief in certain liberal circles that underneath it all, we are all human and are essentially the same. It is asserted that all religions are rooted in love, so we should, therefore, latch onto this easily-digestible core and ignore the profound differences between us.
Without a doubt, this mode is preferable to seeing every religious and cultural difference as a virulent disease that must be eradicated at all costs. History is replete with examples, (from the Crusades to heresy and witchcraft trials to modern abortion clinic bombers, and everything else before and between) of how our refusal to accept religious differences has led to violence. The amount of antisemitism, Islamophobia, Christian persecution, and other religious intolerance we see in our world today is abhorrent and should be condemned without hesitation. But by ignoring and repressing these real, tangible differences, we must ask ourselves whether our inaction and refusal to acknowledge these antagonisms are the very things that lead to these explosions of violence. By repressing these key antagonisms, are we not also distancing ourselves from our culpability via our inability to teach ourselves how to navigate the murky waters of religious difference? By regulating the perpetrators of religious violence to the realm of mental illness or terrorism, are we merely displacing this violence onto sufferers of mental illness and religious radicalism while refusing to take responsibility for how we have failed to promote religious understanding and cooperation through difference?
When we on the Left ignore the core differences between us and refuse to grapple with their implications, we leave the task solely in the hands of those on the Far-Right who see such differences as justifications for violence. Should we thus be surprised when, as a result of the Left’s refusal to at least talk about difference, we consequently see a growing contingent of our population become attracted to right-wing figures who at least acknowledge such difference, but then become radicalized against the Other? By resting in comfortable liberal-tolerance, we repress and ignore such key differences between one another, refusing to allow space for honest, messy, but necessary grappling with these issues in a positive, progressive manner. It is here that we come to the core of our problem of practicing pluralism.
The problem with much of the Left’s utilization of pluralism is not with our self-proclaimed non-sectarian status and deviation from a homogeneous religious orthodoxy, as many theologically conservative commentators might argue. Rather, in our liberal-tolerant culture, our problem with practicing pluralism arises because, at a fundamental level, we are not pluralistic enough. Now, it is too easy to misunderstand the implications of this distinction. The solution to fostering a more pluralistic community is not to simply add more numbers of diverse identities to fulfill some arbitrary, endlessly insufficient quota. In the words of the organization I worked for, “Mere diversity or plurality alone, however, does not constitute pluralism.” Rather, the solution lies in fostering religious understanding through our differences, rather than leveling religious experience.
All too often, we ignore our differences and instead emphasize our similarities to cover over the inherent antagonism that exists between our incommensurable worldviews. This leads to a kind of liberal-tolerant self-satisfaction with surface-level interfaith dialogue, in which we come together, discuss our similar values, and then pat ourselves on the back for how progressive and tolerant we are. When we engage in this surface-level pluralism, we are not truly loving the Other. Instead, we are only loving the parts of ourselves that we see in the Other. This is the narcissistic trap of surface-level pluralism. While these dialogues can indeed be beneficial to help begin the conversation regarding our religious differences and how we can organize disparate communities, if we simply stop there, then we run the risk of losing the real emancipatory potential of such organizations of religiously diverse communities. According to Zizek, contrary to the surface-level promotion of universality in religious dialogue,
Actual universality is not the deep feeling that above all differences, different civilizations share the same basic values, etc.; actual universality appears (actualizes itself) as the experience of negativity, of the inadequacy-to-itself, of a particular identity. The formula of revolutionary solidarity is not ‘let us tolerate our differences,’ it is not a pact of civilizations, but a pact of struggles which cut across civilizations, a pact between what, in each civilization, undermines its identity from within, fights against its aggressive kernel. What unites us is the same struggle. A better formula would thus be: in spite of our differences, we can identify the basic antagonism or antagonistic struggle in which we are both caught; so let us share our intolerance, and join forces in the same struggle. (Violence, 157)
By identifying a central lack that is shared between us all in our various religious traditions, we can begin to build truly emancipatory communities of radical transformation and love, rather than maintaining the status quo by wholly ignoring the real antagonisms and conflict that exist between us. Until we can all come to the table in radical honesty and vulnerability, we will continue to replicate these systems of violence that have kept us distant from one another for so long. But to accomplish this, we must turn away from our squeamish aversion to conflict, and instead embrace conflict and learn how to channel it into a constructive, rather than destructive, force.
Approaching the Traumatic Void of the Other: (or, How To Build Relationships 101)
In 1937, George Orwell, in his less-famous work, The Road to Wigan Pier, wrote: “It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.” In a similar vein, the 8th century Muslim intellectual Abu Hanifa wrote in his Al-Fiqh al-Akbar I, “Difference of opinion in the community is a token of Divine mercy” (while later commentators note that such difference applies to legal opinion rather than Islamic doctrinal views, the sentiment stands all the same). Diversity should be celebrated not because it allows us to feel like we can come together, overlooking our differences for the sake of maintaining the status quo. Rather, differences should be celebrated because, without them, we could not know ourselves as subjects in any meaningful way.
We, especially in the liberal West, tend to avoid conflict in the name of maintaining the social order. Yet, in repressing the central antagonisms that undergird our ways of living, we ignore and perpetuate the systemic violence that serves as the foundation of modern neoliberalism. We fail to understand that true understanding can only arise out of conflict when the Other so disrupts our subjectivity and way of being that we feel a traumatic rupture at the core of our identity. If we choose not to face, embrace, and channel the conflict that we feel between one another (which is more often than not rooted in a conflict within ourselves that’s displaced onto the Other), then we risk patronizing the very faiths we claim to tolerate and accept. Having the courage to acknowledge our differences is the first step in understanding our cultural divides and how to work together in the face of our distinct and divergent beliefs.
On the other hand, we must also be careful to determine whether or not we truly want to be able to encounter the traumatic core of the Other. Of course, we cannot truly understand what it’s like to enter into the subjective experience of the Other; to truly “walk in their shoes.” We risk losing ourselves in the central void of the Other, or worse, once again believing that we are all fundamentally the same, thus mitigating and minimizing real and distinct forms of suffering. We must come to realize that our neighbor confronts us with the monstrosity within ourselves. In her book, Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva writes, “Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity… by recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself” (1). The proximity of the Other forces us to confront the antagonism within ourselves if only we would have the courage to face it.
More often, we tend to care for and love the Other only at a distance. We find it much easier to send charity to those in foreign countries or to write a check for a humanitarian cause that handles the “dirty work” of confronting the Other on our behalf. But as soon as we come face to face with the suffering and incomprehensibility of the Other, we confront the lack within ourselves. The Other fundamentally disturbs us, shattering our safe identities and forcing us to confront the gap within our Being. By acknowledging the Other as complex and ever-fluid subjects, rather than static objects, then we can enter into a space of mutual understanding and growth.
We must come to realize that our identities are relationally constructed, rather than private, individualized spheres of being. No one exists in a vacuum. We form our sense of self from our encounters with those around us. In a fundamental sense, we need the Other to know ourselves. This is the political potential for the psychoanalytic project. According to Kristeva,
The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. [Yet] If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners. Therefore Freud does not talk about them. The ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics: it would involve a cosmopolitanism of a new sort that, cutting across governments, economies, and markets, might work for a mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious – desiring, destructive, fearful, empty, impossible. (Strangers to Ourselves, 192).
All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, are caught in the trappings of ideology. No one has it all figured out, and in our culture fueled by panic, projection, and reaction formations, it can be easy to fall into despair or lash out against our neighbor, clinging to our ideology as justification for a litany of evils. When our ideology becomes predictable, we become increasingly polarized and distant from the Other. Our primary task is to do the difficult work of unraveling how our historically constructed lenses have led us to turn a blind eye toward the Other, and how we can utilize our discontent and angst in productive, politically constructive ways. Even if we cannot fully escape ideology, we should strive to be people who blur the line, who are wholly unpredictable and unbeholden to these systems we have created. Be courageous enough to discover the limits of your identity, not disavowing them or ignoring their role in your life, but allowing yourself the grace to love radically and find connections with those who are similarly at the margins of their identity. Surely, there are a myriad of obstacles in tracing the webs of our intersubjectivity. But it is our duty to find love through the complexity.