Fear drives these crises in subjectivity and, more specifically, a primal fear of the loss of the maternal function. Literary language can, and frequently does, provoke a crisis of identity, and these moments of fluctuating subjectivity mirror our universal exile from the very heart of language and reanimates these latencies. Our subjectivity is never complete, always fluctuating between the symbolic and the irruptions into language of the semiotic. Our “psychotic latencies,” which are held in check by the law and language of the father ( le loi et le nom du père), are thus reanimated when the borders of language and patriarchal authority are breached. By “confronting the foreigner,” says Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves, “whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose my boundaries,” no longer able to contain and explicate experiences within a structured phallogocentric discourse (187). We are forced to cross the border where the foreigner resides. We become exiles in her imagined places where the borders of subjectivity become fluid, unstable, and, in a Freudian sense, decidedly unheimlich (uncanny). In Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, we become estranged from our three-dimensional reality and pulled into a world that is inhabited by foreignness. We are, in effect, strangers travelling through imaginary geographical spaces.
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1 Literary landscapes lead the reader across unfamiliar territory, armed only with an authorial compass to mark hitherto unanchored cardinal points. Presented in literary topoi, these geographical spaces have long lineages. Urban spaces, pastoral scenes, dehydrated desert landscapes.