What are Psychoanalysts for in a Destitute Time? Kristeva and the Community in Revolt

Abstract

“A paradoxical community is emerging”, Kristeva wrote at the end of Strangers to Ourselves, “made up of foreigners who are reconciled with themselves to the extent that they recognize themselves as foreigners” (1991, p. 195). The focus of my paper will be the paradoxical and strained nature of this “community”, a community, we could say, of revolt, if not revolution. It is within a thinking of just such a community that Kristeva's work, despite her suggestion that she long ago left politics after her visit to China in the mid‐70s, problematizes traditional thinking of the political limited to questions of national power and national narratives. What problematizes this thinking of community is what is irreconcilable with any thinking of community, namely the foreigner. Through the course of this essay, I will focus both on the promise of Kristeva's work, as well as those places in her own work resistant, in the everyday and psychoanalytic senses, to just such a thinking of community countenanced in Strangers to Ourselves.