A relational experience of the boundaries of the “self” and the “we”
The stranger is often understood as someone who comes from elsewhere.
Yet the feeling of strangeness seems less tied to geographical distance than to a relational gap, emerging when the social and cultural codes of an individual or a group no longer appear self-evident to the other.
This gap, a source of tensions and of the Heideggerian anxiety of “not-being-at-home,” calls into question not only our individual and collective boundaries, but also our often illusory sense of familiarity.
The term “stranger,” from the Latin extraneus, refers to what is external, much like the word “foreigner,” which also carries the idea of being from outside.
The exterior presupposes an interior: a group, a norm, a system of reference against which it defines itself.
It also presupposes a boundary: a distinction between what belongs and what does not belong.
From a legal perspective, this distinction is often formalized through nationality.
French law, for example, states that “persons who do not possess French nationality are considered foreigners (Article L.111-1 of the French Code on the Entry and Residence of Foreigners and the Right of Asylum).
The stranger thus appears as an objective category, defined by its exteriority to the national framework.
Yet this definition is not sufficient to fully grasp its social reality.
In her work on eighteenth-century Savoy, the Italian modern historian Simona Cerutti shows that a person may come from elsewhere without being considered a stranger, while another, settled for a long time, may become one when they are no longer recognized as belonging to the local network.
The stranger is therefore no longer defined by distant origins or legal status alone, but by their relationship to a collective framework of social recognition.
Strangeness as an experience of relational estrangement
In this sense, the stranger is the one whose way of being, speaking or acting escapes the codes of a given framework.
It appears in relationships, language, behaviors, forms of expression, lifestyles or social codes, when a presence becomes difficult to read, situate or recognize.
The hierarchy of values, the ways of expressing or containing emotions, as well as the forms of respect, disagreement, or discontent, may then differ profoundly from one social framework to another.
As long as these differences remain understandable, they can be integrated.
But when they no longer find their place within a shared framework of recognition, whether familial, communal or national, the gap becomes more difficult to interpret.
It is within this gap, perceived as irreconcilable with the group’s points of reference, that the feeling of estrangement emerges.
The more illegible the codes become, the more intense this feeling of estrangement tends to grow.
In hThe Stranger, by French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, Meursault is not a stranger because he comes from elsewhere, but because he does not conform to the expectations of the group.
He does not display the expected emotions, does not react according to social norms and does not share the implicit language of the collective.
At his mother’s funeral, he does not cry.
What shocks others is not the attitude itself, but what it renders impossible: a shared reading of the situation.
The gap with the group’s usual points of reference provokes a reaction. In Meursault’s case, it takes the form of mistrust and suspicion.
By escaping expected behaviors, the stranger implicitly reveals and destabilizes the points of reference through which the group recognizes and maintains itself.
When the familiar becomes strange
Estrangement reveals less an absolute alterity than an inner tension: the boundary between what is recognized as belonging to the “self”, or the “we”, and what escapes it.
It therefore refers not only to a radical exteriority, but also to the instability of the points of reference through which we construct a sense of familiarity and belonging.
This experience lies at the heart of German philosopher Martin Heidegger's thought through the concept of Unheimlichkeit, often translated as “not-being-at-home”.
The term unheimlich literally refers to the loss of the world’s familiar character: the moment when what once seemed obvious or stable suddenly ceases to feel self-evident.
Strangeness no longer emerges only in the face of external difference, but when the familiar itself becomes uncertain.
Anxiety (Angst) plays a central role here, because it is through it that the subject experiences this Unheimlichkeit, this strange feeling of no longer being “at home”.
This anxiety does not simply refer to fear or terror, but to a rupture with the illusion of stability through which the world had until then appeared familiar and manageable.
« Dasein (being-there) is originally unheimlich (not-being-at-home) »
— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
In this sense, the anxiety provoked by the encounter with the stranger reveals not only an external alterity or the boundaries through which we define ourselves, but also through a shift in perspective on our own “interior”.
Within this shift, the space and distance necessary to make visible our own codes, whether individual or collective, begin to emerge.
The stranger reveals the strangeness of what we had once assumed to be familiar.
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