Publication of Michael Lucken's book "The Universal Stranger

The foreign universal

Michael Lucken

Editions Amsterdam, Humanities & Social Sciences, 340 p.
4 November 2022

Why can we study Japan in particular, but not the foreign in general? First and foremost, because our conception of the universal remains largely monolingual and self-centered. Linked to ignorance - or denial - of the necessarily situated nature of the study of foreign realities, this situation tends to reproduce the logics of domination that structure the world. The result is a deleterious face-off between those who apprehend reality only through the prism of local interests and those who, claiming to be universalists, assume that there are no borders.

To break with this state of affairs, Michael Lucken offers in this book a rich and committed reflection on xenology, whose main historical milestones and various functions he outlines: predation, criticism, generalization and, on the horizon, the metamorphosis of individuals and societies. In this way, he outlines the lineaments of a renewed form of anthropology, more sensitive to the variability of collective imaginaries. And shows that it is only when humans have an intimate experience of the divergence of viewpoints on the world that the universal will cease to be foreign to them.


Michael Lucken is a professor at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, attached to the French Institute for Research on East Asia (Inalco-Université Paris Cité-CNRS). A historian specializing in modern and contemporary Japan, his publications include Les Japonais et la guerre, 1937-1952 (Fayard, 2013), Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts from Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao (Columbia University Press, 2016), and Le Japon grec. Culture et possession (Gallimard, 2019).