(p.3) Strangers, gods and monsters represent experiences of extremity which bring us to the edge. They subvert our established categories and challenge us to think again. And because they threaten the known with the unknown, they are often set apart in fear and trembling. Exiled to hell or heaven; or simply ostracized from the human community into a land of aliens.
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Monsters also signal borderline experiences of uncontainable excess, reminding the ego that iis never wholly sovereign. (...) Each monster narrative recalls that the self is never secure in itself. 'There are monsters on the prowl', as Michel Foucault writes, whose form changes with the history of knowledge. For as our ideas of identidy alter so do our ideas of what menaces this identity. (...) Monsters show us that if our aims are celestial, our origins are terrestrial.
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And what of 'gods' ? (...) Gods generally reside in otherworlds beyond us.
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Most strangers, gods and monsters are, deep down, tokens of fracture within the human psyche. They speak of us of how we are split between conscious and unconscious, familiar and unfamiliar, same and other. And they remind us that we have a choice: (a) to try to understand and accomodate our experience of strangeness, or (b) to repudiate it by projecting it exclusively onto outsiders.
(...) This volume is an attempt to reinvestigate practices of defining ourselves in terms of otherness. In an age crippled by crises of identity qnd legitimation, it would seem particularly urgent to challenge the polarization between Us and Them.
(...) One of my guiding hypotheses in this work will be that we often project onto others those unconscious fears from which we recoil in ourselves. Rather than acknowledge that we are deep down answerable to an alterity which unsettles us, we devise all kinds of evasion strategies. (...) We refuse to acknowledge ourselves-as-others.
(...) Julia Kristeva has suggested that there are three main ways in which we might respond to our fundametal experience of estrangement: art, religion and psychoanalysis. (...) But I will also be suggesting a fourth way of response: philosophy. For if art offers therapy in terms of images, religion in terms of faith, and psychoanalysis in terms of a 'talking cure', philosophy has something extra. (...) it's a certain kind of understanding. During the course of these studies I will be referring to various moments in the history of philosophy which might help us in our search for ways of understanding the Other - from Aristotle's practical wisdom (phronesis) and Kant's 'reflective judgement' to more contemporary hermeneutic models of narrative comprehension (Ricoeur, Arendt, Taylor). My wager is that if the enigma of the Other has been largely ignored by the mainstream metaphysical tradition - going back to Parmenides and Plato who defined the Other in relation to the Same - it resurfaces again anda again throughout our western cultural history in the guise of strangers, gods and monsters who will not go away and continue to command our attention. Preoccupied with the Rule of Reason, most western philosophers since Parmenides have banished the puzzlements provoked by 'strangeness' to the realm of Unreason, namely the cultural unconscious of myth, art and religion. And in the process of this estrangement, the Other passed from the horizon of reflective understanding into the invisible, unspeakable, unthinkable dark.
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To face the Saturnine monster and acknowledge taht it is an integral part of us is to accept the truth that we are strangers-to-ourselves and that we need not fear such strangeness or 'act it out' by projecting such fears onto Others.
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But what every melancholic must ultimately accept is this: the lost thing is really lost and the only cure lies in true mourning, that is, in the readiness to let go of the other we hold captive within or scapegoat without. The key is to let the other be other so that the self may be itself again. I will be suggesting that one of the best aids in this task is narrative understanding: a working-through of loss and fear by means of cathartic imagination and mindful acknowledgement.