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.
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 *