Julia Kristeva's philosophy is typically credited with contributing a psychological perspective on cosmopolitanism as well as cosmopolitan education (Kennedy, 2011). Through her Western-European lens and Freud's concept of the 'uncanny' Kristeva registers the empirical and psychoanalytic portrayal of the foreigner as a frightening 'other'. However, I argue in this paper, colonial undertones accompany Kristeva's cosmopolitanism, making its educational application vulnerable to the charge of refashioning colonial narratives and preserving them as ‘old wine in new bottles’. As Kristeva moves between sociopolitical and psychoanalytical landscapes, colonial residues are sensed since her depoliticization of cosmopolitanism neglects the wounds of colonialism and unwittingly carries them forward as building blocks of the cosmopolitan project. Situating cosmopolitanism within the psychoanalytical realm is thus appearing naïve in the face of historical injustices that, to be grasped and explored in the educational realm, require conceptual refinement of cosmopolitan explanatory tools. Accordingly, the research questions I raise are: what problems arise when the discourse of cosmopolitanism is transferred from the sociopolitical realm to the psychoanalytical one? What implications does Kristevan cosmopolitanism have upon cosmopolitan education? And last, but definitely not least, how can responsibility and justice be cultivated through cosmopolitan education? 

To address these questions, I first begin by discussing Kristeva’s conception of foreignness in Strangers to Ourselves (1991). This discussion aims to highlight how Kristeva’s adoption of portrayals of foreignness leads to a reproduction and a recycling of Western-colonial narratives of foreignness. This makes her cosmopolitan project centre around the stigmatized foreigner instead of comprising concerns for rights and justice (inter alia one based on international law). Therefore, the inattention to cosmopolitan justice depoliticizes cosmopolitanism by rendering it a matter of sociality and psychological acceptance outside of global power relations. Consequently, Kristeva’s depoliticization of cosmopolitanism is neglecting colonial wounds which are actively shaping cosmopolitan education in Kennedy’s (2011) ‘cosmopolitan curriculum.’ The second section of the paper thus deals with the way Kristevan cosmopolitanism is applied in the education realm and it critically interrogates Kristeva’s and Kennedy’s proposal to incorporate forgiveness into cosmopolitan education. It will be argued that instead of engaging critically with the historical notion of foreignness, Kennedy, like Kristeva, oversimplifies cosmopolitan education by extolling forgiveness and reducing cosmopolitan-educational challenges to cultivating a forgiving culture. More specifically, Kennedy (2011, p.384) follows Kristeva in the distinction between judgment and forgiveness and argues that, in a pedagogical context, the ‘teacher must not rush into the space of judgment quickly,’ which propels me to ask: what would this rushing look like? Would the teacher ‘rush’ if they disclosed historical wrongs such as colonialism, illegal settlements, occupations of the land of others, etc., as a violation of human rights after judging and evaluating historical events? I am not suggesting that Kennedy would agree to this, yet what I aim to highlight is that the distinction between forgiveness and judging fails to bring in a critical dimension to the act of forgiving – a dimension which would require an active resistance against conceptual remains of colonialism prior to requesting forgiveness. In other words, the suspension of judgment in the pedagogical context could diminish the emphasis which should be given to historical wrongs which require a lot more than forgiveness to be held accountable for their acts. While Kennedy is right in claiming that judgment can often be fused in biases that obscure factual truth, what is important for cosmopolitan education is to guide the students into seeing through the fog before asking them to address the unjust past in a psychoanalytical manner. Such an approach to forgiveness can thus cultivate responsibility and a more ethically attuned orientation to cosmopolitanism. 

A philosophical mode of inquiry underpins the theoretical framework of this paper. While Kristeva (1991, p.2) identifies the problem of foreignness and seeks to resolve it within the psychoanalytic realm, arguing that we can come to terms with foreignness once ‘we acknowledge ourselves as foreigners,’ this paper adopts a philosophical lens to problematize the very formulation of the problem she advances. Rather than accepting the figure of the foreigner as inherently disturbing, fearful, or strange, I interrogate the conditions under which this portrayal came to be in the first place. Using Freud’s notion of the unheimlich, or ‘the uncanny,’ (Freud, 2003, p. 1) as that which unsettles the self, Kristeva treats the threatening presence of the foreigner as a given psychological reality, one that requires internal acceptance and understanding rather than historical or political scrutiny. What remains insufficiently examined is how this image of the foreigner has sprung from specific historical prejudices, colonial encounters, and sociopolitical constructions that precede and inform the psychic response she describes. The philosophical mode of inquiry that this paper uses allows for a critical pause at this juncture. Instead of moving directly toward the solution of the problem that Kristeva defines, it asks how and why the foreigner came to be perceived as menacing. By tracing the conceptual and historical sedimentations that underlie this portrayal, the paper aims to emphasise why such problematisation is necessary for rethinking the ethical and educational possibilities of cosmopolitanism. Then, by applying Kristeva’s theory upon the educational realm I aim to highlight how such tainted conceptions of foreignness can be recycled and reproduced in subtle yet alarming ways. Kennedy’s (2011) article on the ‘cosmopolitan curriculum,’ which draws on Kristeva and places forgiveness at the psychological foundation of cosmopolitan education, becomes a crucial point of reference for this inquiry. His work illustrates how psychoanalytic reconciliation with the historically scarred foreigner can be translated into pedagogical aims, shaping how cosmopolitan responsibility and ethical relations are to be cultivated. Therefore, bringing Kennedy into the discussion has a methodological purpose: it reveals the educational afterlife of Kristeva’s theory. It aims to illustrate how assigning psychoanalytic labour risks being treated as an essential route to cosmopolitan justice, potentially overshadowing the need for deeper critical engagement with the sociopolitical conditions that produced these perceptions in the first place.

This paper aims to argue for the necessity of Kristevan cosmopolitanism to be couched in a more cautious and politically sensitive idiom that breaks the ties with colonialism that operate beneath the portrayal of the foreigner. To thus decolonize the racialized portrayal of the foreigner, educational efforts on cosmopolitanism should delve into the past with criticality and readiness to address the remains of political and ethical injustices. If not, cosmopolitan efforts would recycle the wrongs of the past instead of rectifying them. As Papastephanou (2002, p.84) argues, ‘A past that is not settled, half-alive, badly buried, is a vampire past. It is one that is not yet delivered to commemoration and celebration in the harmonious play of forgiveness and forgetfulness, re-enacted every time the consequences of the historical discrepancy are felt.’ The image of a ‘vampire past’ depicts how historical injustices and conceptual inconsistencies grow immortal; they will always crawl into our present and future so long as they are not properly addressed, recognized, and met. Imagining colonialism as a badly buried system of domination which haunts Kristeva’s cosmopolitanism implies that its traces and marks will reappear in cosmopolitan visions – such as it is the case in Kennedy’s cosmopolitan curriculum of forgiveness. Therefore, instead of deferring judgment, cosmopolitan education should prioritize such evaluative critique and make clear that without the necessary efforts on the part of those who are responsible for historical injustices, forgiveness cannot arise justly. To successfully bury the ‘vampire past’ (Papastephanou, 2002, p.84) that dwells upon Kristeva’s cosmopolitanism, a decolonial contention to the portrayal of the foreigner, such as the one this paper has argued for, should be emphasised. Or else, how can cosmopolitan education meaningfully cultivate responsibility and justice?

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