Abstract

HONIG, Bonnie. Ruth, an Exemplary Migrant: Mourning and the Symbolic Politics of Immigration. Acta poét [online]. 2010, vol.31, n.1, pp.61-99. ISSN 2448-735X.

The author reads the Book of Ruth in order to rethink the symbolic politics of immigration. Her own reading of Ruth's story is presented after a critique of two other recent deployments of it, Cynthia Ozick's and Julia Kristeva's, and guided by a reversal of the usual questions about immigrants: instead of asking how we should solve the problem of the foreigner, the author asks "what problems might the foreigner solve for us? And, how do the symbolic politics of immigration redeploy foreignness on behalf of democracy or the nation?". She argues that, although both Ozick and Kristeva acknowledge the power of the foreigner to found anew the regime that receives him (according to Ozick through the act of choosing such a regime, according to Kristeva through his difference, which "worries" the regime's sovereignty), they at the same time ignore the deep undecidability of the immigrant, who both unsettles the regime with his foreignnness (hence the text's repeated references to Ruth as "the Moabite") and helps shore up the regime with his supplement (in Ruth's case this supplement is said to be her exemplary virtue). From this reading of Ruth, the author argues for acknowledging the need of the immigrant of spaces in which he can properly mourn his losses, as well as the need for a real democratic cosmopolitanism to engage the foreigner as such, without asking him to affirm the dominant categories of the receiving regime. She concludes by giving examples of spaces in which such a work of mourning and of living together can take place, in order to propose a democratic cosmopolitanism which is nurtured, and not only threatened, by the undecidability of its immigrants.

Keywords : Ruth; immigration; undecidability; politics; psychoanalysis; cosmopolitanism.

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