Cultural mise-en-abyme

Getting lost in Kristevan abjection and thinking a lot of my own limits of the abject, I ended up with a melancholic feeling about US. Last night I had a long conversation in a Thai-Hungarian restaurant about facing other cultures and what is going on in the process. My argument was that the most difficult shocks are those when you are not foreign to the culture but you have a sort of mise-en-abyme by confronting your own lack of cultural limits. It was exactly what I felt in US: on one hand I was so familiar with everything that I saw and touched but on the other hand it was so strange and uncanny. I wasn't sure of my own subjectivity and its abject limits. Being in and out of a culture that you think you know hugely disturbs. My dear friend, Jeanne, writes here a very interesting entry on her return to Memphis. No wonder that today I had an earlier post on Burroughs' vision of America.