Julia Kristeva refracts the impulse to hate (and our attempts to subvert, sublimate, and otherwise process it) through psychoanalysis and text, exploring worlds, women, religion, portraits, and the act of writing. Her inquiry spans themes, topics, and figures central to her writing, and her paths of discovery advance the theoretical innovations that are so characteristic of her thought.
Kristeva rearticulates and extends her analysis of language, abjection, idealization, female sexuality, love, and forgiveness. She examines the ‘maladies of the soul, ‘ utilizing examples from her practice and the ailments of her patients, such as fatigue, irritability, and general malaise. She sources the Bible and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa of Ávila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O’Keefe. Balancing political calamity and individual pathology, she addresses internal and external catastrophes and global and personal injuries, confronting the nature of depression, obliviousness, fear, and the agony of being and nothingness.
Throughout Kristeva develops the notion that psychoanalysis is the key to serenity, with its processes of turning back, looking back, investigating the self, and refashioning psychical damage into something useful and beautiful. Constant questioning, Kristeva contends, is essential to achieving the coming to terms we all seek at the core of forgiveness.
Table of Content
Foreword, by Pierre-Louis Fort
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Part I. World(s)
1. Thinking About Liberty in Dark Times
2. Secularism: “Values” at the Limits of Life
3. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and . . . Vulnerability
Part II. Women
4. On Parity, Again; or, Women and the Sacred
5. From Madonnas to Nudes: A Representation of Female Beauty
6. The Passion According to Motherhood
7. The War of the Sexes Since Antiquity
8. Beauvoir, Presently
9. Fatigue in the Feminine
Part III. Psychoanalizing
10. The Sobbing Girl; or, On Hysterical Time
11. Healing, a Psychical Rebirth
12. From Object Love to Objectless Love
13. Desire for Law
14. Language, Sublimation, Women
15. Hatred and Forgiveness; or, From Abjection to Paranoia
16. Three Essays; or, the Victory of Polymorphous Perversion
Part IV. Religion
17. Atheism
18. The Triple Uprooting of Israel: Exodus, Exile, Return
19. What Is Left of Our Loves?
Part V. Portraits
20. The Inevitable Form
21. A Stranger
22. Writing as Strangeness and Jouissance
Part VI. Writing
23. The “True-Lie, ” Our Unassailable Contemporary
24. Murder in Byzantium; or, Why I “Ship Myself on a Voyage” in a Novel
Notes
Notes on the Origins of the Texts
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 “for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature.”
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