Amongst those words that travel around the world there are some that are particularly revealing: it is the case with pariah. We think it originates from India, where, in effect, it arrived in the XVIth century as part of the vocabulary of military men, to describe both the members of the inferior casts and the outcasts. Two centuries later, it comes back to Europe where its use spreads through political and literary circles. For the philosophers of the enlightenment, far-away hierarchical systems offer a useful foil for the denunciation of local forms of oppression. The discourse on the other is in fact a discourse of the Occident on itself, which simultaneously marks its emancipation and its difference. But at the time when the status of the ‘free men of colour,’ of the Jews as well as that of women is being discussed, emancipation does not apply similarly to all, and the pariah thus reappears as the one who is excluded from the human rights recently proclaimed. In political manifestoes and militant actions, it comes to represent successively women, the people, the workers… Theatre and literature propagate its representation; it is also incarnated as the outcast poet or writer whose marginality is idealized; Romanticism will celebrate its sensitivity. Exclusion thus exalts the pariah but does not foster freedom.
Informed and brilliantly presented, Eleni Varikas’ study moves from literature to political discourse and theoretical constructs (looking at the writings of Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Hannah Arendt amongst others) to explore the metamorphoses that tell about the continuing repression of those that are the world’s outcasts.
Eleni Varikas was born in Athens. She lectures in Political and genre theory at the University of Paris 8, and is affiliated to the research centre Genre, Travail, Mobilités of the CNRS. She has published in several languages, and is the author of Penser le sexe et le genre (PUF, 2006) and one of the authors of Gender and History. Retrospect and Prospect (Blackwell, 2000).
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