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9 (Bauman 1990, 149)
(Bauman 1990, 149)
...The stranger is, indeed, someone who refuses to stay in the ‘far away’ land or go away and hence a priori defies the easy expedient of spatial or temporal segregation. The stranger comes into the lifeworld and settles here, and so—unlike in the case of mere ‘unfamiliars’, it becomes relevant whether he is a friend or a foe. He made his way into the life-world uninvited, thereby casting me on the receiving side of his initiative, making me into the object of action of which he is the subject—all this being a notorious mark of the enemy. Yet, unlike other, ‘straightforward’ enemies, he is not kept at a secure distance, not on the other side of the battle line. Worse still, he claims a right to be an object of responsibility—the friend/enemy opposition, he’d come out simultaneously under and over-determined. And thus, by proxy, he’d expose the failing of the opposition itself. He is a constant threat to the world order.
Not for this reason only, though. There are more. For instance, the unforgettable and hence unforgivable original sin of the late entry: the fact that he had entered the realm of the life-world at a point of time which can be exactly determined. He did not belong ‘initially’, ’originally’, ‘from the very start’, ‘since time immemorial’. The memory of the event of his coming makes of his very presence an event in history, rather than a fact of nature. His passage from the first to the second would infringe on an important boundary in the map of existence and is all the more impossible for being resolutely resisted; such a passage would amount, after all, to the admission that nature is itself an event in history and that, therefore, the appeals to natural order or natural rights deserve no preferential treatment. Being an event in history, having a beginning, the presence of the stranger always carries the potential of an end. The stranger has a freedom to go. He may be also forced to go—or at least forcing him to go may be contemplated without violating the order of things.
