NONFICTION - May 2, 1993

NATIONS WITHOUT NATIONALISM by Julia Kristeva, translated from the French by Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press: $18.50; 102 pp.). One looks at the prospect of reading most contemporary French intellectuals--with their soaring abstractions and obsession with postmodernism--much as one might look at Yosemite’s Half Dome: It’s challenging and arduous work, but is it worth it? At times on our ascent of Mt. Kristeva, we wonder, for all handholds can vanish into an impenetrable slab of untranslatable French: “The facet that I call ‘plutonian,”’ Kristeva writes, “appears to me closer to a writing of contagiousness, of postmodern availability.” Naturellement! Once at the top, however, we reach any number of insightful heights. Kristeva, a Parisian psychoanalyst and linguistics professor, is one in a growing number of European leftists who have come to realize that while nationalism and ethnic pride can lead to racism, they can just as often discourage it. This point will not be new to most conservatives, of course, but Kristeva develops it with originality. Building on psychoanalytic theories, she argues that just as we fear strangers when we lose touch with our memories (and thus our selves), so too do nations fear others when they lose touch with their implicit and expressed traditions.