While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and transform feelings of violence and depression.
Reviewing Kristeva’s corpus, Elaine P. Miller considers the intellectual’s ‘aesthetic idea’ and ‘thought specular’ in their capacity to reshape depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. She revisits Kristeva’s reading of Walter Benjamin with reference to melancholic art and the imagination’s allegorical structure; her analysis of Byzantine iconoclasm in relation to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of negation and Hegel’s dialectical negativity; her understanding of Proust as an exemplary practitioner of sublimation; her rereading of Kant and Arendt in terms of art as an intentional lingering with foreignness; and her argument that forgiveness is both a philosophical and psychoanalytic method of transcending a ‘stuck’ existence. Focusing on specific artworks that illustrate Kristeva’s ideas, from ancient Greek tragedy to early photography, contemporary installation art, and film, Miller positions creative acts as a form of ‘spiritual inoculation’ against the violence of our society and its discouragement of thought and reflection.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Losing our Heads
1. Kristeva and Benjamin: Melancholy and the Allegorical Imagination
2. Kenotic Art: Negativity, Iconoclasm, Inscription
3. To Be and Remain Foreign: Tarrying with L’Inquiétante Étrangeté Alongside Arendt and Kafka
4. Sublimating Maman: Experience, Time, and the Re-erotization of Existence in Kristeva’s Reading of Marcel Proust
5. The ‘Orestes Complex’: Thinking Hatred, Forgiveness, Greek Tragedy, and the Cinema of the ‘Thought Specular’ with Hegel, Freud, and Klein
Conclusion: Forging a Head
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Despre autor
Elaine P. Miller was educated in Saudi Arabia, India, and Turkey before returning to the United States to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from De Paul University. She is professor of philosophy at Miami University, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century German philosophy, aesthetics, and contemporary European feminist theory. She is the author of
The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine and the coeditor of
Returning to Irigaray.
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