Fremde (the Foreign, Strange, Other) and the Museum

Abstract

The museum as an institution has had a historically incomparable career in Europe (and elsewhere), a fact this article attempts to explain. Its basic assumption is that the success of the museum does not rest on a promise of experiences of familiarity, on the contrary, its success is due to the increase in experiences of alterity in modern society. The museum is intrinsically a place of foreignness: the objects are delocated, they originate from a foreign place (in the geographic and/or historical sense), and they are (didactically) presented in contexts that “estrange” them. As a place of “heterodoxy” (in Baudrillard's sense of the term), the museum has been described by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as a “xenological institution,” meaning that it encourages an “intelligent border traffic with foreignness” by presenting, framing, and explaining the Other. In this sense, the museum is an institution which responds to specific needs of modern society.