This paper traces back on a personal tone a provocative evocation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The author considers existentialism as a laboratory of existence that influenced a generation's manner of living and writing and made one's existential desires into historical and political acts. Its most representative mode of expression, literature, was as an indicator of the presence of the private throughout the public world and time. In this view, de Beauvoir's presence is approached both from the perspective (...) of her understanding of the female, and from the particular kind of couple she formed with Sartre. (shrink)

The format of this volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series provides for a detailed interaction between those who interpret and critique Julia Kristeva's work and Kristeva herself, giving broad coverage, from diverse viewpoints, of all the major topics establishing her reputation. This work begins with her autobiography, which provides an excellent introduction to her work, situating it in relation to major political, intellectual, and cultural movements of the time. The major part of the book is (...) comprised of thirty-six essays by Kristeva's foremost interpreters and critics, together with her replies to the essays. These encounters cover an exceptionally wide range of theoretical and literary writing. The strong international and multidisciplinary focus includes authors from over ten countries, and spans the fields of philosophy, semiotics, literature, psychoanalysis, feminist thought, political theory, art, and religion. A comprehensive bibliography of works by Kristeva is included. (shrink)

Looks at the psychological nature of depression and discusses its portrayal in literature and art.

Où est le temps, existe-t-il encore? Je vous propose d'ouvrir la question du TEMPS. Jamais le temps n'a été aussi compact, uniformisé, fermé comme il l'est désormais à la surface globalisée de l'hyperconnexion. Mais jamais non plus il n'a été aussi ouvert et multiple : incessant battement d'avènements, amorces, émergences, éclosions perpétuelles. Je retrouve ici des expériences singulières : dans l'érotisme maternel et dans celui de la foi religieuse, j'ose parier sur la culture européenne et sur l'humanisme à refonder, je (...) découvre un destin de la psychanalyse en terre d'Islam et en Chine. Je n'ai pas de réponses toutes faites et n'en donne pas une fois pour toutes. Je déplie des vérités hic et nunc telles que je les vis et les pense. Je vous présente mes compagnons de route : Antigone et Philippe Sollers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Jacques Lacan, Jackson Pollock et Emile Benveniste ; Simone de Beauvoir et Thérèse d'Avila. Un livre sur la Vérité découverte par le Temps? Plutôt une expérience du temps scandée par des événements, des étonnements, rebonds de surprises et de renaissances. (shrink)

Passions of Our Time showcases recent essays of Julia Kristeva's that demonstrate her capacious intellect, her gifts as a stylist, and the profound contribution of her thought to the challenges of the present. Kristeva considers literature, translation, psychoanalysis, disability, gender, humanism, and universalism, among other topics.

Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse.".

In 'Tales of Love' Julia Kristeva pursues her exploration of the basic emotions that affect the human psyche. The processes are similar to those followed in 'Powers of Horror'.

Discusses the foreigner in Greek tragedy, in the Bible, and in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day.

"These days, who still has a soul?" asks Julia Kristeva in her latest psychoanalytic exploration, New Maladies of the Soul. Drawing on her fifteen years of experience as a practicing psychoanalyst, Kristeva reveals to readers a new kind of patient, symptomatic of an age of political upheaval, mass mediated culture, and the dramatic overhaul of familial and sexual mores. New Maladies of the Soul poses a troubling question about the human subject in the West today: Is the (...) psychic space that we have traditionally known disappearing? Kristeva finds that the psychoanalytic models of Freud and Lacan need to be reread in light of this new patient, a product of the contemporary moral crisis of values resulting from a loss of ideology and a deterioration of belief. By revisiting Freud and Lacan, Kristeva offers the hope of a new psychoanalysis. Each patient, she contends, suffers from a unique malady which must be targeted. In the first half of New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva offers a series of detailed and fascinating case studies that reinforce her provocative theoretical notions. These case studies illustrate today's "new maladies" - common psychiatric disturbances such as hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and perversion - as they are manifested in today's patient. Drawing on the work of psychologist Helene Deutsch and the writer Germaine de Stael. Kristeva turns her attention in the second half of New Maladies of the Soul to women's experience and contributions within the broader context of contemporary history. Delving into art, literature, autobiography, and theories of language, she continues with an exploration of cultural products ranging from the Bible to the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Julia Kristeva offers the hope that these maladies harbor new creative potential, and new hope for the soul - if we can comprehend their effect on the individual and collective experiences of our time. (shrink)

This is the story of the clattering of elevated subways and the cacophony of crowded neighborhoods, the heady optimism of industrial progress and the despair of economic recession, and the vibrancy of ethnic cultures and the resilience of ...

The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in his Totem and Taboo and discussing his often neglected vision of language.

Is the Confucian tradition compatible with the Western understanding of human rights?

She sources the Bible and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa of Avila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O'Keefe.

This is the story of the clattering of elevated subways and the cacophony of crowded neighborhoods, the heady optimism of industrial progress and the despair of economic recession, and the vibrancy of ethnic cultures and the resilience of ...

: In this June 2004 interview, Julia Kristeva takes us through her long and extraordinary career as a writer, an intellectual, and an academic. She speaks of her early years as a radical poststructuralist, postmodern feminist, and discusses how her scope has broadened with the addition of psychoanalytical theory and practice. She answers questions about her work on the abject, melancholy, motherhood, and love, and reveals how personal experiences, like the death of her father, have shaped parts of (...) her literary output. (shrink)

Popular uprisings, indignant youth, toppled dictators, oligarchic presidents dismissed, hopes dashed, liberties crushed in prisons, fixed trials, and bloodbaths. How are we to read these images? Could revolt, or what is called “riot” on the Web, be waking humanity from its dream of hyperconnectedness? Or could it just be a trick played on us so that the culture of spectacle can last longer? But what “revolt” are we talking about? Is it even possible?

In this June 2004 interview, Julia Kristeva takes us through her long and extraordinary career as a writer, an intellectual, and an academic. She speaks of her early years as a radical poststructuralist, postmodern feminist, and discusses how her scope has broadened with the addition of psychoanalytical theory and practice. She answers questions about her work on the abject, melancholy, motherhood, and love, and reveals how personal experiences, like the death of her father, have shaped parts of her (...) literary output. (shrink)

The big question mark (in guise of a preface) -- This incredible need to believe : interview with Carmine Donzelli -- From Jesus to Mozart : Christianity's difference? -- Suffering : Lenten lectures, March 19, 2006 -- The genius of Vatholicism -- Don't be afraid of European culture.

In her first biography of a fellow psychoanalyst, the prolific Kristeva considers Klein's life and intellectual development, weaving a narrative that covers the history of psychoanalysis and illuminates Kristeva's own life and work.

The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States, though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian (...) "deconstructivism" though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness: psychoanalysis—not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and, perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event .For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and "revolutionaries"—in all cases, jealous guardians of their academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:1. There are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning. This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation.3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art and About Chinese Women.Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du langage poétique. (shrink)

In November 1996, Clement and Kristeva began a correspondence exploring the subject of the sacred. In this collection of those letters Clement approaches the topic from an anthropologist's point of view while Kristeva responds from a psychoanalytic perspective.

This paper traces back on a personal tone a provocative evocation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The author considers existentialism as a laboratory of existence that influenced a generation's manner of living and writing and made one's existential desires into historical and political acts. Its most representative mode of expression, literature, was as an indicator of the presence of the private throughout the public world and time. In this view, de Beauvoir's presence is approached both from the perspective (...) of her understanding of the female, and from the particular kind of couple she formed with Sartre. (shrink)

Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time.

This guest column suggests that we should follow Hannah Arendt in resisting the urge to expound doctrines or systems and, instead, should disclose the processes of our thought as they are “in motion.” While we should not hesitate to express judgments, our aim in intellectual work should be to occasion (and experience) surprise. Like Arendt, we should candidly express “the bliss of thought” as we think and write. On this basis, the political arena can become “a space for self-analysis and (...) (by analogy with psychoanalysis) continuous rebirth.” And it is only on this basis, Kristeva argues, that reconstruction, after a century of unprecedented destruction, be accomplished without our succumbing to nostalgia. Efforts at reconstruction must be undertaken, as Arendt undertook them, “in light of the history of nihilism” and “in the name of sheer survival.” Kristeva joins Arendt in advising against a return to foundationalism while at the same time urging the development of a kind of “re-foundationalism.” Kristeva concludes by showing how, in these attitudes, Arendt's thinking was—despite her notorious dismissal of psychoanalysis—in tune with those of Freud. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION: LE LIEU SÉMIOTIQUE JULIA KRISTEVA Les stoïciens furent probablement les premiers à developper une théorie détaillée du SIGNE - du ...

I will then uphold that new political actors are incarnating and realizing this refoundation of humanism which the globalized world direly needs. I take as examples two of these experiences which cruelly lack a means of expression in today’s codes of humanism: adolescents in want of ideals and maternal passion at the cross-roads of biology and meaning. At these crossroads of body and meaning, of biology and sublimation it is perhaps dance more than other trans-linguistic experience that informs and accompanies (...) the process of transhumanisation as it counters the crisis and exceeds the impending threat of apocalypse. (shrink)

Last year I published an autobiographical text in the form of interviews with a young psychologist entitled Je me voyage. The title’s neologism gives a nod to my foreign status in the French language which has largely determined my psychosexual positioning in research and in writing; the psychic experience has been central to my life’s trajectory In my familial context, culture constituted a world that made life liveable —and I experienced life, due to the importance accorded to language, as survival, (...) as an intimate resistance and an inherent creativity in social time. (shrink)

Written originally as part of a Common Knowledge symposium responding to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s homily against relativism, which was delivered immediately before his election as pope, this essay describes a reactionary German intellectual current that includes not only Ratzinger and the conservative jurist E.-W. Böckenförde but also the more liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas. What the three share, according to Kristeva, is their assessment of “rationalist humanism” as incapable of sustaining constitutional democracies, which by nature “need ‘normative presuppositions’ [on which] (...) to found rational law.” In an effort to “counterbalance this hypothesis,” she argues that “we are already confronted with... experiences that render obsolete any appeal for a normative conscience.” These experiences comprise discoveries of the modern human sciences above all psychoanalysis and literary theory, which “are likely to found the ‘unifying bond’ that secular, political rationality has until now lacked.” Thus, she concludes, “modern thought, which is neither hostile nor indulgent toward religion, may be our one good option as we face, on the one hand, mounting obscurantism and, on the other, the technological management of the human species.”. (shrink)