Julia Kristeva

The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva

(VOLUME XXXVI, 2020)

Julia Kristeva is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris 7–Diderot and full member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. She is a writer, psychoanalyst, and novelist whose major works, including some 30 books, are all translated into English. She has taught regularly at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and the University of Toronto. She is the first laureate in 2004 of the Holberg Prize, created by the Norwegian government to remedy the lack of human sciences in the Nobel list. She founded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for women’s freedom in 2008 and was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2006. Her works have extraordinary breadth, from philosophy, linguistics, and literature to psychoanalysis, religion, public health, maternity, ethics, and politics, as well as original and penetrating works of fiction. Her search for a new humanist vision both keeps a stake in Enlightenment thinking and redraws the philosophical and psychoanalytic paths of what has come to be known as “negativity,” opening up investigations that resonate with the crises humanity is facing in our times. This monumental volume includes Kristeva’s autobiographical reflections in interviews with Samuel Dock. The thirty-six critical essays, by leading thinkers of today and experts on Kristeva’s work, cover the full range of her work, and are included with Kristeva’s replies to each essay, and a full bibliography of her writings.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Intellectual Autobiography of Julia Kristeva, Interviews with Samuel Dock

(Replies follow essays)

Dominique Ducard: The Semiotic Chora and the Inner Life of Language

John Lechte: Language, Literature, and the Founding Murder in the Work of Julia Kristeva

Eléana Mylona: Julia Kristeva Between the Semiotic and the Symbolic: The Process of Signifiance      

Philippe Forest: Birth of the Novel, Yesterday and Today

Marian Hobson: Julia Kristeva’s Farewell to Philosophy

Maria Margaroni: Artaud’s Madness and the Literary Obscene: Humanism and Its Double in Julia Kristeva

Miglena Nikolchina: Signifiance and Transubstantiation: The Returns of the Avant-Garde in Kristeva’s Philosophy of Literature

Bernard Brusset: Julia Kristeva: Original and Innovative Contributions at the Core of Psychoanalytic Theory

Jean-Louis Baldacci: Abjection, Reliance, and Sublimation

Jean-François Rabain: Julia Kristeva, Reader of Aragon              

Anish Kapoor: Dear Julia

Elaine P. Miller: Julia Kristeva on the Severed Head and Other Maternal “Capital Visions”

Carin Franzén: An Antidote to the Crisis of Contemporary Culture: Rereading Kristeva on Duras

Françoise Coblence: Aesthetics According to Julia Kristeva                     

David Uhrig: No Present Apart        

Pierre-Louis Fort: Julia Kristeva and the Detective Novel: Fiction and Metaphysics                    

Edward S. Casey: Depression: Heading Down and Out

Alina N. Feld: Melancholia: Passing Through and Beyond

Michal Ben-Naftali: A Baroque Reading of Tales of Love

Keren Mock: Language and Sacredness in the Quest for Subjectivity

Robert Harvey: Of Incredibility in the Need to Believe: A Philosophical Exploration

Alain Delaye: The Need to Believe and the Desire to Know

Emilia Angelova: Abjection and the Maternal Semiotic in Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt                    

Sarah K. Hansen: Intimate Revolt at the Margins of Community and the Hope of Postcoloniality

Daniel Cohn-Bendit: Hannah Arendt Prize Speech 2006

Rosemary Balsam: The Controversial Nature of Kristeva’s “Maternal Reliance”

Rachel Boué-Widawsky: Maternal Eroticism and the Journey of a Concept in Kristeva’s Work

Fanny Söderbäck: Maternal Enigmas: Kristeva and the Paradoxes of Motherhood

Charles Gardou: The “Intimate Face” of a Common Thought and Action                         

Eivind Engebretsen: Evidence-Based Medicine and the Irreducible Singularity of Being: Kristeva’s Contribution to the Medical Humanities                                                                                 

Marie Rose Moro: The Polyglot Imaginary, a Poetics, and a Clinic           

Jean Vanier: “Their Look Pierces Our Shadows”

Cecilia Sjöholm: From Denial to Forgiveness: Kristeva, Arendt, and Radicalization

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek: A Materialist Ethics of Psychoanalysis? Reflections on Matter, Forgiveness, and Vulnerability

Noëlle McAfee: Kristeva’s Latent Political Theory

Kelly Oliver: The Democracy of Proximity and Kristeva’s New Humanism

Bibliography of the Writings of Julia Kristeva