Strangers to Ourselves

Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 “for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature.”

Kristeva suggests that the antidote to xenophobia, racism and other weapons against outsiders is to recognize that "the foreigner is within us." [Strangers to Ourselves] demonstrates [Kristeva’s] amazing command of history, politics, literature, linguistics, and psychology. . . . [and] 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.

• 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...NotesIndex