-- San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

About the Author

Julia Kristeva is a leading French intellectual, practicing psychoanalyst, and Professor of Linguistics at the Universite de Paris VII. Columbia University Press has published other books by Kristeva in English: In the Beginning Was Love, Tales of Love, Revolution in Poetic Language, Powers of Horror, Desire in Language, Black Sun, Language: The Unknown, and The Kristeva Reader.

Table of Contents

1 Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner2 The Greeks Among Barbarians, Suppliants, and Metics3 The Chosen People and the Choice of Foreignness4 Paul and Augustine: The Therapeutics of Exile and Pilgrimage5 By What Right are Are You a Foreigner?6 The Renaissance, "So Shapeless and Diverse in Composition"7 On Foreigners and the Enlightenment8 Might Not Universality Be...Our Own Foreignness?9 In Practice...Index

Reviews

Kristeva, who teaches linguistics at the University of Paris and is also a practicing psychoanalyst, traces the concept of the ``stranger'' or ``foreigner'' in various cultures and periods from the Greeks to the present. This--albeit highly selective--excursion through intellectual/political history is influenced by Freud's notion of the alienation, or ``splitting off,'' of the self that comes about as the result of the repression of feelings and the ideational content attached to them. It is the sense, Kristeva argues, that we are also ``strangers to ourselves.'' This book is primarily for academic audiences and, though not an essential purchase, will delight advanced students and faculty in intellectual history, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.--Leon M. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel , Management Lib., Washington , D.C.

Kristeva suggests that the antidote to xenophobia, racism and other weapons against outsiders is to recognize that "the foreigner is within us." [The book] demonstrates her amazing command of history, politics, literature, linguistics, and psychology...argues powerfully for a radical examination of self, beginning with the realization that what is most fearful to us in the stranger may be the very quality we do not want to recognize in ourselves. Only through this reconciliation with our estranged self, Kristeva asserts, can we begin to give fair treatment to others. San Fransisco Examiner-Chronicle