Passions of Our Time
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- 35,99 €
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- 35,99 €
Publisher Description
Julia Kristeva is a true polymath, an intellectual of astonishingly wide range whose erudition and insight have been brought to bear on psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique. Passions of Our Time showcases recent essays of Kristeva’s that demonstrate the scope of her capacious intellect, her gifts as a stylist, and the profound contribution of her thought to the challenges of the present.
The collection begins with а vivid recollection of celebrating, as a child in Bulgaria, Alphabet Day, the holiday honoring the Cyrillic letters, which proceeds outward into a contemplation of the writer as translator. Kristeva considers literature with Barthes, freedom through Rousseau, Teresa of Avila and mystical experience, Simone de Beauvoir’s dream life, and Antigone and the psychic life of women. A group of essays drawing on her psychoanalytic work delve into Freud, Lacan, maternal eroticism, and the continued importance of psychoanalysis today. In a series of striking investigations, she thinks through disability and normativity, monotheism and secularization, the need to believe and the desire to know. Calling for the courage to renew and reinvent humanism, she outlines the principles of a stance founded on the importance of respecting human life. Finally, Kristeva discusses French culture and diversity, rethinking universalism and interrogating the potential for Islam and psychoanalysis to meet, and pays homage to Beauvoir by rephrasing her dictum into the provocative “One is born woman, but I become one.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Linguist, psychoanalyst, and novelist Kristeva (The Severed Head) has produced a heavy-going collection of scholarly essays, written in dense poststructuralist academese. Its topics include "maternal eroticism," disability, secularism and religion, diversity and cultural relativism, and the death penalty. Kristeva also explores the influence of Simone de Beauvoir, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, St. Teresa of Avila, and Syrian psychoanalyst Rafah Nached. Kristeva's ideas can be intriguing, but her delivery tends toward the tedious and convoluted. A representative sample: "Maternal reliance as a detotalized universe made up of heterogeneous strategies cannot be fixed in any type of monolithic representation, much less worshipped as a goddess." She is most successful avoiding the abstract and grounding her discussions in current events, as when asserting that "while the cult of identity (national or sexual) engenders new militancies, the European space runs against this trend, since in Europe national identity' is no longer a cult but is now a constantly evolving reality to question." This collection will appeal to Kristeva's dedicated readers, but is unlikely to provide an entry point to those new to her work.
