ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores Julia Kristeva’s claim that such a challenge to foundationalism is inherent to the psychoanalytic enterprise. She highlights how, despite her insistence on otherness, her theorizing of lesbian desire contains problematic contradictions which foreclose on the specificity and diversity of individuals’ sexualities. In Kristeva’s view psychoanalysis challenges the foundationalism or formalism of western metaphysics. Psychoanalysis provides a theory of the genesis of the psyche—the timing of the subject in its instinctual and/or object relationships. Kristeva claims that it is psychoanalysis that gives heterogeneity an analysable status by designating it as sexual desire and/or death wish. The symbolic stage of development begins with the mirror stage to which psychoanalysts have attributed the capacities for absence and representation. Kristeva praises Freud for challenging the western concept of subjectivity in terms of self-conscious rationality. A common argument proposed against psychoanalysis is the self-justification of its theoretical stand; disagreements are interpreted in terms of repression and defence.
