This book is concerned with the notion of the "stranger" -the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own- as well as the notion of strangeness within the self -a person's deep sense of being, as distinct from outside appearance and their conscious idea of self. Kristeva begins with the personal and moves outward by examining world literature and philosophy. She discusses the foreigner in Greek tragedy, in the Bible, and in the literature of the Middle (...) Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the twentieth century. She discusses the legal status of foreigners throughout history, gaining perspective on our own civilization. Her insights into the problems of nationality, particularly in France are more timely and relevant in an increasingly integrated and fractious world. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an examination of the shared connections between the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the Austro-Hungarian movement theorist, Rudolf Laban.In many ways Merleau-Ponty''s philosophy demonstrates a synthesis of the best in existen-tialism and phenomenology. In like manner, Rudolf Laban was a synthesizer of experiences and theories of movement.

This project represents almost a decade of wrestling with the agonizing personal and political implications of a life-altering disease which officially has been dismissed as a psychoneurotic disorder of anxious, middle-aged women. Curiously, though physicians and researchers since the early 1980s have reported numerous cluster outbreaks throughout the U.S.A., the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases --the two distinguished government agencies in charge of disease surveillance and prevention--have treated this disruptively embodied condition as (...) "the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," a pathological "non-entity" sparked by an over-zealous media and flamed by mass hysteria. The lived-expressions of persons located inside the actual terminus of such devastating disability and public stigmatization, however, reveal the volatile repercussions of such unwitting oppression and frank trivialization. ;I explore here both the phenomenological issues of personal identity and the semiotic implications of social formation within this reversible dialectic of perception/expression, with the goal of reimagining the demise of the stable, healthy body otherwise. While I take a semiotic-phenomenological approach to understanding the lived experience of one particularly enigmatic chronic disabling condition, and though I have immersed myself in a variety of interdisciplinary texts, this project is not primarily a textual or historical study of either medical, phenomenological, or semiotic themes. Rather, it is a study radically grounded within an actual body of experience--as lived in ongoing rupture, in what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called "ontological contingency" and Nancy Mairs, more poetically, the "abyss of uncertainty." In sum, this project represents an emblematic attempt to describe--rather than construct--the actual voices of savage disease, to recover authentic expression within the once unthinkable horror of bodily rupture, and to encourage sociosemiotic transformation in the midst of a disembodied status quo hidden behind layers of culturally sedimented ideals of health, stability, and productivity. (shrink)