Progress in spirit

Freud and Kristeva on the uncanny

Vanessa Rumble

pp. 168-195

in: Richard Kearney, Kascha Semonovitch (eds), Phenomenologies of the stranger, New York City, Fordham University Press, 2011

Abstract

In the penultimate chapter ofStrangers to Ourselves(1989), Julia Kristeva distills the “political and ethical impact of the Freudian breakthrough.”¹ Surfacing at the close of an invigorating cultural (and classically Kristevan) romp through political, literary, and philosophical history, carrying us from dawning awareness of sexual difference (“the first foreigners: women”) to Jewish, Greek, and Roman representations of autochthony and otherness, and finally to Enlightenment thinking on universalism, her remarks on the uncanny in Freud signal our entry into a domain decisively shaped by Kristeva herself: that of politics and psychoanalysis.

Cited authors

Freud Sigmund

Kristeva Julia