This article deploys a double conceptual framework. One frame is positioned through the ideas of absolute strangers and outsiders. The other frame develops out of, though is distinct from, the first, and refers to the disaggregated forms of modern citizenship. The citizen-as-absolute-stranger in addition to accruing political rights may also accrue social, economic or identity rights, or traverse wider relations between him or herself and other absolute strangers in either national or international settings. It is in this context that outsiders are configured - aliens who have no national-juridical status

No abstract

is a member of the generation of Irish intellectuals who have come to prominence in the wake of Ireland's gradual emergence from its years of national self-enclosure. Ireland's embrace and support for the then European Economic Union in 1973, and its ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, represent its own escape from this legacy, and from its historical subordination to, and dependence on the UK. This orientation towards Europe is part of Ireland's post-imperial and post-national sensibility. Richard Kearney's work embodies this postnational sensibility and European orientation, and is represented especially by his Postnationalist Ireland (1997). In his more recent Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2002a), this orientation is given greater critical voice in addressing the forms of demonization towards others, strangers and outsiders that have occurred in the current period.Accompanying his critical engagement with contemporary Ireland, Kearney has also critically engaged with the French hermeneutic,

No abstract

No abstract