Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva

Edited by Kelly Oliver & S. K. Keltner

Subjects: Philosophy, Literary Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics
Series: SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
Paperback : 9781438426501, 261 pages, January 2010
Hardcover : 9781438426495, 261 pages, June 2009

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction:Politics from ‘a bit of a distance’
S. K. Keltner
Part I. Two Statements by Kristeva
1. A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living
Julia Kristeva, translated by S. K. Keltner
2. Decollations
Julia Kristeva, translated by Caroline Arruda
Part II. The Violence of the Spectacle
3. Meaning against Death
Kelly Oliver
4. Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular: Encountering the (Mulholland) Drive
Frances L. Restuccia
5. Julia Kristeva and the Trajectory of the Image
John Lechte
6. The Darkroom of the Soul
Robyn Ferrell
7. Julia Kristeva’s Chiasmatic Journeys:From Byzantium to the Phantom of Europe and the End of the World
Maria Margaroni
Part III. Intimacy and the Loss of Politics
8. Love’s Lost Labors:Subjectivity, Art, and Politics
Sara Beardsworth
9. Symptomatic Reading:Kristeva on Duras
Lisa Walsh
10. What Is Intimacy?
S. K. Keltner
11. Fear of Intimacy? Psychoanalysis and the Resistance to Commodification
Cecilia Sjöholm
12. Humanism, the Rights of Man, and the Nation-State
Emily Zakin
13. Kristeva’s Uncanny Revolution:Imagining the Meaning of Politics
Jeff Edmonds
14. Religion and the “Rights of Man” in Julia Kristeva’s Work
Idit Alphandar
Contributors
Index

Considers the social and political significance of Kristeva’s oeuvre.

Description

The social and political relevance of Julia Kristeva's work is perhaps the central question in Kristeva studies, and the essays in this collection provide a sustained interrogation of this complicated problematic from a variety of perspectives and across the various contexts and moments of Kristeva's forty-year writing career. Presenting Kristeva's thought as the sustained interrogation of a political problematic, the contributors argue that her use of psychoanalysis and aesthetics offers significant insight into social and political issues that would otherwise remain concealed. The collection addresses the entirety of Kristeva's oeuvre, from her earliest work on poetic language to her most recent work on female genius, and it includes two previously untranslated essays by Kristeva, as well as original contributions from scholars working in several countries and a variety of disciplines.

Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Women's Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her previous books include Language and Liberation: Feminism, Philosophy, and Language and Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan, both also published by SUNY Press, along with Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind and The Portable Kristeva. S. K. Keltner is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kennesaw State University.