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65 I argue that Kristeva views art in a contrary manner: as the attempt to safeguard the foreignness at the heart of our existence and our context. I also argue that in implicitly taking the Kantian sublime, rather than the beautiful, as a starting point for a consideration of the political (in a manner that is both derivative of and in opposition to Arendt’s attempt to cull a political philosophy from Kant’s Critique of Judgment), Kristeva gives us a way of thinking alterity as not simply an inevitable feature of human psychic identity and global citizenship but a quality to be cultivated and preserved, a sense of always being strange to ourselves.

An example of this latter tendency is the gigantic unfinished Crazy Horse statue in South Dakota, a memorial that has been under construction since 1948 and that has been surrounded by controversy. S. presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, the sculpture boasts a largerthan-life likeness of a man who refused throughout his life to be photographed and who even asked that his grave remain unmarked. The “memorial” further desecrates the nature whose destruction was an integral part of the critique of Mount Rushmore in the first place.

36 This ensures, on Fanon’s view, a seamless transition from famil- kristeva and benjamin 29 ial to civic life for any subject who has been raised in a functional family. For black culture, however, Fanon writes, it is almost exactly the opposite. ”37 This abnormality is provoked not by a return on any level to familial psychic traumas that shaped the child in infancy or childhood but rather to injections of popular white culture—which present villains, savages, and evil spirits as black—into black culture during childhood, injections that only have their full effect at a later date, when the black subject enters in a full-fledged way into the white man’s world.