From the early centuries, the Evangelist John has been referred to as “the theologian.” And rightly so, for Christian theology, as we have come to know it, is inconceivable without his Gospel and especially its Prologue. Its words have provided the vocabulary for theological reflection thereafter, and it seems certain that, until the middle to the end of the second century, the annual celebration of Christ’s Passion, Pascha, was only celebrated by those who recalled how John had worn the distinctive (...) headdress of the high priest in Jerusalem: the only disciple to remain at the foot of the cross, John was, for them, the high priest of the paschal mystery. It is thus perhaps not surprising that it was especially in John, and his words about the revelation of Christ, the Word and Life, that Michel Henry found a vision of Christianity that resonated with the phenomenology that he had been investigating from his initial magnum opus, The Essence of Manifestation, through to his final Christian trilogy: first, I Am the Truth: Towards a Philosophy of Christianity, then several years later, during which time he read Tertullian and most importantly Irenaeus, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, and finally, appearing in print posthumously, Words of Christ. (shrink)

The Kristeva Circle Conference of 2017 in Pittsburgh confirmed that writers throughout the world have been engaging with Julia Kristeva’s thought in large numbers and in ways relevant to “an ethics of inclusion,” the topic of the Conference. The question of race arguably came to a head at the conference when one of the founders of the Kristeva Circle, Fanny Söderbäck, commented on the paper just delivered by Kristeva via Skype, “The Psychic Life--A Life in Time: Psychoanalysis and Culture.” According (...) to Söderbäck, we run the risk of reinforcing Islamophobic views that equate terrorism with Islam if we focus on young women intent on jihad without simultaneously addressing the behavior of white men bent on white supremacist violence and terrorism. Kristeva did not directly address the issue of her lecture’s reinforcement of Islamophobic views in her response. Instead, she spoke at some length about a patient whose confrontation with Arabic poetry led to improvement in her psychic health. I introduce the following papers in part as a dialogue with Kristeva on race and as a response to Söderbäck’s comments. The essays all make reference to questions of race and ethnicity in Kristeva’s work. They do so in ways that provoke thought on the contributions of psychoanalytic writing, appreciated and also criticized for its universalizing tendencies, which may in part explain its vulnerability to charges of racism. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva's Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila confronts us with the contemporary problem of violent forms of fundamentalism, especially Islamic, as it recreates the life of Saint Theresa. The novel's psychoanalytic perspective engages our emotions and sensations, and is also therapeutic for author and reader. But most of all, it engages our thinking and deals in depth with this compelling, timely issue.

In a new book titled Wild Things: Queer Theory After Nature, I develop a new critical vocabulary to access different, transdisciplinary ways of thinking about race, sexuality, alternative political imaginaries and queer futurity and extinction. Wildness in no way signals the untamed frontier, or the absence of modernity, the barbarian, the animalistic or the opposite of civilization. Rather, in a post-colonial and even de-colonizing vein, it has emerged in the last few years as a marker of a desire to return (...) queerness to the disorder of an unsorted field of desires and drives; to the disorienting and disquieting signifying functions it once named and held in place; and to a set of activist and even pedagogical strategies that depend upon chance, randomness, surprise, entropy and that seek to counter the organizing and bureaucratic logics of the state with potential sites of ungovernability and abjection. Wildness signifies in my project in a number of different ways, but here I use the framework of “abjection” to explain some of the appeal of wildness and a few of the ways in which it expresses relations between the unnamable, the excessive, horror and death. Later on, I will turn to a set of performances and art projects that are deliberately auto destructive and that collectively imagine the end of the human. (shrink)

Here I investigate the possibility of a phenomenological approach to Christianity, with the understanding that this would not be a matter of proposing an interpretation, but that such an “approach” would be able to lead directly to the heart of Christianity. I will say immediately that a phenomenology that would be able to undertake such a task is not the historical phenomenology that was born with Husserl. Only an ideal phenomenology that would become what is required would be able to (...) respond to our investigation. This ideal phenomenology is a phenomenology of life. (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)

Kristeva's Teresa My Love concerns the life and thought of a 16th century Spanish mystic, written in the form of a novel. Yet the theme of another kind of foreigner, equally exotic but this time threatening, pops up unexpectedly and disappears several times during the course of the novel. At the very beginning of the story, the 21st century narrator, psychoanalyst Sylvia Leclerque, encounters a young woman in a headscarf, whom Kristeva describes as an IT engineer, who speaks out, explaining (...) that "she and her God were one and that the veil was the immovable sign of this 'union,' which she wished to publicize in order to definitively 'fix it' in herself and in the eyes of others." In this paper I ask what difference Kristeva discerns between these two women, a distinction that apparently makes Teresa's immanence simultaneously a transcendence, but transforms a Muslim woman in a headscarf immediately into an imagined suicide bomber. Despite the problematic aspects of this comparison, we can learn something from them about Kristeva's ideas on mysticism and on art. Both mysticism and art are products of the death drive, but whereas the suicide bomber and the animal directly and purely pursue death Teresa and Adel remain on its outer edge and merely play with mortality. (shrink)

This article explores the idea of film as a possible means for articulating original philosophical concepts, in Gilles Deleuze’s sense of concepts. The first of two parts, critically re-examines current ideas about film as philosophy in relation to Deleuze’s ideas on philosophy and cinema/art. It is common within the field of film-philosophy to trace back its central argument that film/cinema is capable of expressing original philosophy, to Deleuze’s cinema books. In and around these books, however, Deleuze did not express such (...) an idea and rather underlined sharp formal differences between cinematic thinking and philosophy. Cinematic thinking takes the form, he argues, of blocks of movement/duration whereas philosophy is defined as the art of creating concepts. Still, could a close critical scrutiny of and some creativity with Deleuze’s thought allow for taking a step he did not take? The second part of the article takes on the speculative question of whether it is possible to create a notion from within Deleuze’s thought as a whole, that allows for at least the theoretical possibility of articulating original philosophical concepts – as Deleuze defines them – in and through film, and what this would mean for our understanding of the concrete form of concepts. The article examines Deleuze’s concept of concepts, his descriptions of complicating intersections between philosophy and art, some partly conflicting statements on Godard over the years, aspects of his analyses of filmic thinking in Cinema 2 that can be seen to provide preliminary components for articulating concepts in and through film, and it discusses the place and function of words and texts in such filmic articulations. If the aim of the first part is to clarify Deleuze’s positions on film and philosophy the aim of the second part resonates with the Deleuzian/Nietzschean quest for formal renewal of philosophy. The overall aim is to re-problematize and provide subtle new means for conceiving of and discussing the notion of film as philosophy. (shrink)

This paper offers a Kristevan reading of Antoon's The Corpse Washer. Although this text focuses specifically on Arab/Muslim culture, which cannot be translated into a racial category, this reading is meant to show the pertinence of Kristevan psychoanalytic theory in a non-Western context. One might go about linking such psychoanalytic work on non-Western writing to “race” in two ways. Insofar as The Corpse Washer demonstrates the validity of Kristevan psychoanalytic theory for non-Western art/artists, it implies the universality of that theory, (...) despite ethnicity, race, religion, etc. Or if we presuppose the universality of Kristevan psychoanalytic theory, we may think of such work as testing the assumption that psychoanalysis can traverse all such culturally constructed boundaries. (shrink)

In her early work on Modernist poetry and avant-garde poetics, Julia Kristeva proposed a bifurcated view of the poetic text as simultaneously constituted by both a “genotext” and a “phenotext.” Reading the “genotext” of any given poem might start by “pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices and melodic devices ”; and, in her words, it would also need to take into consideration “the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic (...) and logical features.” This essay seeks to demonstrate how Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge might be analyzed at the level of its genotext, taking as its primary example the first of the book’s eighty poems to illustrate how a straightforwardly genotextual analysis might proceed. The essay contends that, by closely observing the genotext of Mullen’s poetry in Muse & Drudge, one may eventually arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the “polyvocal” and “polymorphous” nature of the language and poetic design of the poems in this enigmatic collection. (shrink)

In the triumvirate of personalities and motives—from Wright and Baldwin to Coates—we encounter the essential elements of the “crisis” that configures black passage in the New World. These lines of kinship, both consanguineous and ineffable, travelling from father to son, from uncle to nephew, from one generation to the next, lend us a figurative rhythm that grasps the notion of the processional —the traversal of time and space that remains fundamentally mysterious, just as we can put our finger directly on (...) the problem—black life is still as endangered and precarious as it ever was. If one regards such passage as a “crisis,” then it is precisely because it is riddled with turning points, sudden ruts and rifts in the road when the way seemed smooth and clear—those moments when decisions must be made—and from that perspective, African-American cultural apprenticeship offers, by definition, crisis not as a state of exception, but rather, as a steady state, given historical pressures that bear in on it and that become, as a result, intramural pressures. What I wish to do in these remarks is to clarify one of the questions engendered by this predicament, and that is to say, the riddle of identity and how it matters, but even more than an inquiry into the identitarian, I am searching for a protocol through intramural space. (shrink)

Without the maternal hold, without its herethical ethics and sublimation, without the stability that this hold can bring, we are melancholically or defensively driven to commit the most heinous acts of atrocity and violence in the name of eternal life, development, and progress. For the most part, Kristeva has described the combination of personal loss and social, cultural, and historical pressures brought to bear on the vexed sublimation of the maternal hold by artists like Giovanni Bellini. More recently, however, her (...) attention has turned to other contemporary examples, in particular, Max Beckmann whose works, she claims, sublimate the loss of the maternal hold itself. They are examples of a Sacred Family, a Pietà, or a Dormition that have undergone a radical transformation. They are representations of a society, a culture, indeed a world, that is losing its maternal hold; a world that is losing both its herethical ethics, and the capacity to sublimate its apoptotic inheritance. Following Kristeva, I will put Eduardo Lalo’s book of poems and drawings Necrópolis in a tradition of representation of the maternal hold that is close to a thousand years old. This tradition goes from the confrontation with nothingness in Theophane the Greek’s Dormition to the modern matricide represented in Pablo Picasso’s Maternity Apple. (shrink)

A review of Rockwell F. Clancy, Towards a Political Anthropology in the Work of Gilles Deleuze: Psychoanalysis and Anglo-American Literature.

A review of Rockwell F. Clancy, Towards a Political Anthropology in the Work of Gilles Deleuze : Psychoanalysis and Anglo-American Literature.

To understand the dynamics of the verbalization of surprise, I will start with the philosophical theoretical place that is, in my opinion, the most remarkable in terms of the descriptive phenomenology of surprise, namely, its approach by Paul Ricœur in Freedom and Nature in terms of what he calls “emotion-surprise.” This theoretical position will lead me to retrace, in a second step, the archeology of what Ricoeur calls the “circular phenomenon” or the “circular process” of surprise, which includes body language (...) in a burst of "shaking" and the language of cognitive as well as aesthetic "shock". There is an a priori antinomy here that is based on a post-Cartesian duality of the body and the mind, but it is circularized by Ricoeur. On the basis of this dual model of surprise, I will retrace its genealogy in a number of authors and will analyze some first-person descriptions that come from “microphenomenological interviews” [ entretiens d’explicitation ]. (shrink)

This text is a translation of two extracts from Vincent Descombes' 2014 book Le parler de soi. The majority of the translation consists of the chapter that Descombes dedicates to discussing Descartes extensively. In this text, Descombes analyzes “egotistical sentences,” or I-statements, beginning with the infamous example from Descartes. From here, he develops a substantial meditation on the nature of the self and its inherent philosophical paradoxes. The “radical question” guiding Descombes is whether or not an egotistical sentence has or (...) implies a subject in the metaphysical sense. The conclusion, ultimately supported in part by Anscombe’s work on “I-thoughts,” explains how it could be that a subject is not implied by an egotistical sentence. (shrink)

This paper argues against a common misunderstanding of Foucault's work. Even after the release of his lectures at the Collège de France, which ran throughout the 1970s until his death in 1984, he is still often taken to have made an "ethical" turn toward the end of his life. As opposed to his genealogies of power published in the 1970s, which are relentlessly suspicious of claims of individual agency, his final monographs focus on the ethical self-formation of free individuals. I (...) suggest that this basic misinterpretation makes possible interpretations of Foucault's work as being sympathetic to neoliberal government, by linking the ethical turn to a "liberal" or "neoliberal" turn in his thought. I present a case against the ethical turn by arguing that Foucault's main focus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, is a concern for the ways in which we become obligated by truth. (shrink)

Le but de cette contribution c'est d'analyser la lecture derridienne du Monsieur Teste de Valéry afin de montrer que, par cette figure énigmatique, Derrida a voulu proposer une déconstruction double : une déconstruction de l’égologie souveraine au moyen de l’hétérologie contre-souveraine et vice-versa.

This article offers a definition of medical humanism and identifies four key contemporary medical humanists in France. It then makes two claims about the historical provenance of their humanism. First, they define it in opposition to a process of iatric medicalization that they trace to certain conceptual errors made by Descartes. But second, they remain more Cartesian than they seem to realize because they accept Descartes's knotting together of humanity, ethics and language. By looking at Gori and Del Volgo, Roudinesco (...) and Ricoeur, the author is able to show how French medical humanism repeats the Cartesian gesture of locating humanity in language - thus facing the problem of the moral standing of so-called "marginal" human persons and non-human animal persons. The author concludes with a call to radicalize French medical humanism in pursuit of a more inclusive medical "personism". (shrink)

Beginning with Jacques Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign, I identify two forms of curiosity: 1) scientific curiosity, which proceeds through objective dissection and 2) therapeutic curiosity, which proceeds through observational confinement. Through an analysis of Derrida’s treatment of both sorts of curiosity, I notice and develop a third, deconstructive form of curiosity. Through repeated turn to the work of Sarah Kofman, I characterize this third curiosity as, by turns, linguistic, animal, and critical. As linguistic, this curiosity is a penchant for (...) wordplay and a keenness for the unsteady reservoirs of signification, resisting any clean dissection of meaning or the confinement of terms. As animal, it tracks a scent, regularly suspending its paw, as if to emphasize the meandering and precarious quality of knowledge. And as critical, it combats the illusions of pure revelation and instead draws attention to the conjuring trick, the systematic substitution of signs, undergirding it. Finally, I consider in what way Derrida’s resistance to philosophy may be read on the grounds not of a singular wonder but of multiple curiosities. (shrink)