A Bipolar Personal World
[O]ne certain outcome of exile is the creation of a bipolar personal world. Spatially, the world becomes riven into two parts, divided by an uncrossable barrier. Temporally, the past is all of a sudden...
View ArticleThe Danger of the Exilic Posture
[T]he potential rigidity of the exilic posture may inhere not so much in a fixation on the past as in habitual detachment from the present. [T]his posture, if maintained too long, allows people to...
View ArticleAll Homesickness Is Fiction
[T]hese days we are wont to say not so much that all fiction is homesickness as that all homesickness is fiction—that home never was what it was cracked up to be, the haven of safety and affection we...
View ArticleArbitrary Nature of Existence
Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. I knew something they...
View ArticleTo Shed All Memories
The newcomers make themselves at home; they adapt themselves easily and gladly to the material environment, and make a moral environment of their own on that solid basis, ignoring or positively...
View ArticleThe Trap of Memory
Memory is potent…for almost any immigrant. As you scramble to piece together your future in an unknown environment, you only have the past and its customs to guide you. But the past and its customs are...
View ArticleBetween Flight and Origin
Can one be a foreigner and happy? The foreigner intimates a new idea of happiness. Between flight and origin: a fragile limit, a provisory homeostasis… The strange happiness of the foreigner is to...
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Through Other Lenses: American Robotnik Readings for November 2014
From Around the Web “Conservatives Are Driving Americans Away from Religion” by Claude S. Fischer, Boston Review, October 15, 2014 — Self-explanatory. “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture” by...
View ArticlePeople Thrown Into Other Cultures
The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. —Rebecca Solnit, “The Blue of...
View ArticleTo Dismantle the Center of the World
Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but also, undoing the very meaning of the world and–at its most extreme–abandoning oneself to the unreal which...
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