Customer Reviews (4)

abject waste of time
This book is unintelligible and I truly doubt that one would be "way ahead" of the intellectuals to understand 30% of it.Kristeva needs to tone down the effusive gibberish.The only parts I found interesting and accessible were her literary analyses.But, indeed, I would call this work pseudo-philosophy.

Are You Subject to Abjection?
Excellent resource for the Lacanian scholar, if you are looking specifically at abjection.If you are looking at Subjectivity theory overall, however, this is too specific.Luckily, my focus is abjection, and this book really did wonders for the article I'm working on!

Difficult but worthwhile, ohmy!
Don't be abjected even further than you already are, read this book and allow Kristeva's language to take you on a hallucinatory journey to the limits of symbolization. The act of reading this book can be, at times, an excersize in facing/coping with abjection. If you're patient, go slow, and finally understand thirty percent of this book, you'll be leagues ahead of most intellectuals out there.

Uncanny...astonishing...
Kristeva rules... To everyone who has some interest in the ABJECT matter, here's the Bible! Uncanny... ... Read more

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A portrait of Parisian intellectuals of the 1960s as seen through the eyes of Olga, a young Eastern European who comes to Paris to write a literary thesis, and finds herself immediately swept into the world of a group of young leftist thinkers and writers known as the "Samurai". ... Read more

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"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism."

So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our "incredible need to believe"& mdash;the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides.

Kristeva suggests that human beings are formed by their need to believe, beginning with our first attempts at speech and following through to our adolescent search for identity and meaning. Kristeva then applies her insight to contemporary religious clashes and the plight of immigrant populations, especially those of Islamic origin. Even if we no longer have faith in God, Kristeva argues, we must believe in human destiny and creative possibility. Reclaiming Christianity's openness to self-questioning and the search for knowledge, Kristeva urges a "new kind of politics," one that restores the integrity of the human community.

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In this absorbing, suspenseful novel Julia Kristeva combines social satire, medieval history, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and autobiography within a gruesome murder mystery.Murder in Byzantium deftly moves from eleventh-century Europe, wracked by the turbulence of the First Crusade, to the sun-dappled, cultural wasteland of present-day Santa Varvara, threatened by religious cults, gangs, and a serial killer on the loose.

This killer is murdering members of a dubious religious sect, the New Pantheon, and leaving a mysterious figure eight drawn on their corpses. Meanwhile, Sebastian Chrest-Jones, a noted professor of human migrations, clandestinely writing a novel about the Byzantine princess-historian Anna Comnena, disappears on a quest to learn more about an ancestor who roamed across Europe to Byzantium during the First Crusade. Kristeva's recurring characters, detective Northrop Rilsky and the French journalist Stephanie Delacour, step in and desperately try to piece together the two-part mystery in the midst of their unexpected love affair.

In the tradition of Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and Ian McEwan, Kristeva skillfully weaves philosophical and critical ideas into her fiction. Peering into the mores, obsessions, and excesses of contemporary society, Kristeva offers an engrossing portrait of Santa Varvara, a paradoxical place of sunshine and pollution where skeletons lurk in the closets of politicians and oil company executives. Her descriptions of the First Crusade and the Byzantine Empire vividly evoke a distant past while speaking to such contemporary concerns as immigration, fundamentalism, terrorism, and the East-West divide. Murder in Byzantium is also the only work in which Kristeva explores her Bulgarian roots. In the midst of this rich, multilayered historical novel, Kristeva also presents three stunning, closely observed, and interlocking portraits of characters struggling with loss and emptiness in their personal histories and day-to-day lives.

Customer Reviews (3)

Read the description of the novel carefully
I wont go into too much detail here... just say that this is less of a novel and more a series of character introspectives. It would be appreciated by students of philosophy and anthropology rather than casual readers. There are some insightful and provocative gems in this work (comparisons of modern political efforts to those of Byzantium). But it takes some patience to find them. This is not a story of Byzantium or really even a murder mystery in my opinion. Rather is uses both Byzantium and death symbolically to offer commentary on life, culture and morality in a post 9/11 world. If you want a narrative driven tale of suspense, this is not your book. Neither would I compare it to the writing of Umberto Eco or Perez-Reverte. It is far more opaque in its message than books by the other authors and frankly her prose just doesnt compare. Nor would I "buy it for the Dan Brown fan in your life". Dan Brown thinks he has academic chops. Kristeva really does and she is writes about ideas, history, language and culture with far more sophistication. That said - the book reads like a therapy session and gets bogged down by (dare I say it) too many words. I have a felling I will be thinking about it for a long while - though honestly I have not enjoyed reading it.

11th Century Byzantium
Murder in Byzantium
by Julia Kristeva

This contemporary story is included because of its hefty inclusion of information about the First Crusades and the world's first female historian, Anna Comnena (1083-1153). whom Kristeva sees as "the leading intellectual of her day."

The primary character is journalist Stephanie Delacour who has been sent from Paris to the fictional country of Santa Varvara to report on a serial killer busily dispatching members of the Mafia/terrorist based New Pantheon sect. Here she again meets Commisario Northrop Rilsky, who rapidly becomes her lover. While Northrop tracks down the source of the multiple murders, Stephanie researches the mysterious disappearance of the Commisario's relative, the eccentric medieval and migration historian Sebastian Chrest-Jones. It is Chrest-Jones's travels following the route of a French crusader which offers the fanciful but intriguing interpretation of the chaotic life and times of Anna Comnena.

This is not an easily read, straight forward story. Author Kristeva, a renowned French intellectual of Bulgarian birth, gives us an erudite, layered, and somewhat abstruse narrative. Intersected with the plot are musings about immigration, migration, globalization, the cultural clash between the East and Latin West, the Bogomil "heresy," persecuted Jews, devastated Thracian peasants, the Alexiad, Maria of Bulgaria, and so forth. A major theme is the connections between the world and ideas of the first Crusaders to those of today.

Maps of the routes of the French and German Crusaders during the First Crusades included. This is the author's second book with Delacour and Rilsky as investigators.

Misleading
The Publisher has done injustice to the reader and author by comparing this novel to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.Whereas Eco's work is a rare jewel that seems to bet better with time, it cannot be compared to the current work.This author has her own voice and style that is much different than Eco.By making such claims, the reader familiar with the former work is naturally set up for a dissapointment and may miss what is good and notable in the present novel.

In particular, both authors have a great fund of knowlege of an area of history and have endeavored to create fiction using their historical and philosophical skills.The present author, unfortunately, creates diversions in her novel that distract the reader from becomming engrossed in the unique insights of the author.Such a novel should endeavor to educate and to entertain.The love affair between two of the main characters may serve as a basis for a subplot unpon which the main plot is built.In my opinion, however, it is an unwelcome distraction.

The author also attempts the difficult tast of moving back and forth between the remote past and the present, obviously an attempt to recreate the mindset of one of the murderers.This is necessary for the novel to work but either through translation or style it is awkward and sometimes difficult to follow.Faulkner was the master of this difficult genre and one shuns not the difficulty but admires the seamlessness.

Perhaps the most distracting and annoying part of the novel is the author's moralizing on current events in an attempt to create a thesis comparing 21st century American foreign policy to the Crusades.This is all well and good but the author here blurs the distinction between nonfiction and fiction.The art is in leading the reader to entertain such a thesis without stating it much less harping on it.

Finally, Eco's work is humble and patient in nature and despite his great intellect and grasp of his subject matter he never "talks down" to the reader.Here, one is annowed by the tone of the prose which is a bit snobbish and assumes a level of understanding and knowlege of facts, literature and events that few may have.In doing so, the author misses an opportunity to fully educate and share her deeper thoughts with a wider readership that will simply skim over the pedantic rantings to find out who done it.Tis a pity for the subject matter is rich and deserves better.

Nonetheless, the book is entertaining and worth reading.You would do better to approach it without the great expectations the publisher claims. ... Read more

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Part detective story, part fable, this novel takes the reader to a mythical post-industrial city where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarianism have been erased. ... Read more

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InBlack Sun, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, as well as psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment lies at the very core of depression's dark heart.

In her discussion she analyzes Holbein's controversial 1522 painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb," and has revealing comments on the works of Marguerite Duras, Dostoyevsky and Nerval.Black Sun takes the view that depression is a discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated.

Customer Reviews (3)

Billy Us
Kristeva's is definitely worth a read. While staking a claim for the salubrious effects of psychoanalysis, the author freshly details art's engagement with melancholy and depression. The first chapter or two will make rough going for the reader who is not amused by the lexicon of psychoanalysis. But even readers with a literary intolerance of that sort will find the third chapter on feminine depression sensitively written and thoughtfully invested with human presence. The chapters on art and artists with melancholia make generally excellent reading. The most brief of the chapters, "Beauty: The Depressive Other's Realm," provides a soaring inauguration of the author's poetic and psychoanalytic approaches to the madness and melancholia among Durer, Nerval, Dostoevsky, and Duras. The chapter on Duras might not bear a discussion of an author familiar to American readers but it is worth reading because it alone of the chapters explicity raises questions concerning politics, expectations, madness and depression. The author investigates the sites she has chosen with great sensitivity and radiant intellect. Scattered clouds will be apparent to those who find psychoanalysis an unsatisfying or capricious methodology of investigation.

A different approach to depression. A "must read."
This is a different approach to depression.Too often, our focus has been on the DSM-IV approach, or to the treatment of depression using selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac and Paxil.Very rarely does somebody, let alone a respected psychoanalyst, attempt to explain what it actually *feels* like to experience major depression.This is a writing that gives meaning to depression, and I feel that it helps people and their families understand the experience of depression.

The process of all modalities of psychotherapy involves communication, a dialogue between the therapist and the client. This process draws the client out and is an essential factor in the care of the client. Kristeva emphasizes the "antidepressant qualities of psychoanalysis."While acknowledging the utility of antidepressants in psychotherapy, the function of the linguistic component seeks to emphasize the meaning of the "inconsolable loss" experienced by the depressed patient.To symbolically illustrate the sensation of depression, Kristeva uses great sensativity in drawing on the poetry of Gerard de Nerval, the novels of Doestoyevsky, and Hans Holbein's picture "Dead Christ."

"Dark Sun" had meaning to me because of its emphasis on the *individual* and how he or she feels. We must always emphasize the dignity of the individual in dealing with the depressed.

An energetic and exhaustive study of the blues.
In much the same way that Philippe Aries took the subject of childhood and illuminated it for all time in "Centuries of Childhood," fellow French writer (although Bulgarian-born) and Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva examines depression and melancholia. She comes at it from various angles and filters: fine arts, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and of course psychology. She posits psychoanalysis as a (really THE) 'counterdepressant' -- convincingly. This is great highbrow stuff: chapters with titles like"Beauty, the Depressive's Other Realm," and "Life and Death of Speech." Death, suicide, the inevitable gloom resulting from loss of maternal, later erotic,love; all are insightfully discussed -- even rather tenderly. If you're depressed BLACK SUN won't make you more so -- and if you're feeling okay to begin with, it's a terrific scholarly study. ... Read more

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traces the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts. But the essays of Julia Kristeva in this volume, though they often deal with literature and art, do not amount to either "literary criticism" or "art criticism." Their concern, writes Kristeva, "remains intratheoretical: they are based on art and literature in order to subvert the very theoretical, philosophical, or semiological apparatus."Probing beyond the discoveries of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson and others, Julia Kristeva proposes and tests theories centered on the nature and development of the novel, and on what she has defined as a signifying practice in poetic language and pictural works.fully shows what Roman Jakobson has called Kristeva's "genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms,' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks." ... Read more

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Beyond Lacan and Freud: Language and Psychoanalysis
In this book Kristeva takes on the issues of language and psychoanalysis, expanding upon Lacan's views on desire and language. (Lacan said: All speech is demand, the demand for love). Kristeva is considered a genius in her field, and highly respected in France (where all this work goes on nowadays). Here she is presented in translation so that the English-reading world can enjoy her work.

The interest in such theories of language, semiotics, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis is slim in the English speaking world, and this is unfortunate. Not enough scholars of language look to Lacan and Kristeva, but they should. The text is difficult, and even more so in translation, but it is worth struggling through. However, for the reader with little background in the subject matter, penetrating Kristeva's work may be almost impossible without guidance.

This book is subtitled 'a semiotic approach to literature and art'. What Kristeva does is apply her theories to the area of aesthetics, especially her specialty area of the novel. Unfortunately, her studies are naturally based on the French novel (19th century), so readers unfamiliar with novellists such as Mallarme might have a problem following this aspect of her work. ... Read more

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Her analysis deals with the role of narcissism and idealization in the formation of a love object. She accounts for the role of the death drive by coining the term "love/hate."

Customer Reviews (2)

very sweet
I read this book from start to finish and just couldn't get enough of it. A friend of mine in college gave it to me even though i'm not really an avid reader like she is. It kept me up many a night. So check it out. Also check out this other book she gave me called "Tales of love, ugliness and stars under the sea." Also very awesome. It's more poetic stuff, but i found it equally moving.

An Interesting Love Theory
This book picks up Western love as main theme and analyzes its both diachronic and synchronic aspects. In the first part, Kristeva shows her theory of love as the theory of psychoanalysis. It is very interesting herethat her attention is concentrated on transference in psychoanalysis. Then,with this theory of love, we can read histories of Western love from Plato,the Bible, Narcissus, to St. Thomas and heroes and heroines in love storiessuch as Don Juan, Romeo and Juliet, and Mary. These histories and storiesare in harmony with the next part in which Kristeva analyzes discourses oflove in texts of Troubadour, Jeanne Guyon, Baudelaire, Stendhale, andBataille. Reading here, we can learn what Western love has ever been, whichenables us to think about modern love. Finally, Kristeva mentions to thecrisis of love, which emerges now because of the abolition of psychic spaceand discusses psychoanalytic role, especially, transferencefs one. Kristeva shows various aspects of Western love as a mosaicof histories, stories, and texts, which are connected logically each otherby psychoanalysis and the theory of love. Therefore, this book has a veryclear composition. This is why I like this book. Another reason is that Iam interested in Kristevafs idea which differentiates Western love fromJapanese one. I think that she also shows how to approach Japanese lovewhich has been thought to be changed dynamically these years, not onlyWestern one. ... Read more

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A clear introduction to Kristeva examining her work on language and textuality, subjectivity, feminism and sexuality, politics, identity and nationality. ... Read more

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Extremely Helpful
The book gives an overview of Kristeva's theory. It surely has helped me to understand better the language used by Kristeva. It also includes other references given by other theorists such as Lacan. This guide does not subsistitute reading the original material published by Kristeva but it traces a guide-line for those who are not acquainted with Kristeva's theories. After reading this guide, some points that were still blurry for me on Kristeva's theory are now a lot clearer. I recommend it! ... Read more

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The linking of psychosomatic to literary and literary to a larger political horizon raises the question of conservative premises to linguistic, pyschoanalystic, philisophical, and literary theories and criticisms of such.

Customer Reviews (4)

Theory as a unleashed adventure
In this great book, you will find a whirled stairway to the very innards of that stirring and shaking inquiry called theory. From Saussure to Husserl, from Plato to Freud, and taking on Chomsky, Frege, Hjelmslev and las but not least, Lacan, Kristeva undertakes a criticism which is that of the two most troubling concepts in the western thought: the subject and the sign.
In order toa new and, more and foremost, springing overture to come about, this French psychoanalyst and critic penetrates in the very core of the more intricated authors who built his theories within the sing and the subject; a sign and a subject Kristeva tears apart from the confortable room that eiher in structuralism (with Saussure and Hjelmslev, but also with Noam Chomsky) as in fenomenology (with Husserl)they reside, and finds out the semiotic, this motilities drives whiches allow a freer subject to show up in the very symbolism of language and, even with no destroy it, disrupt it from within, taking over the symbolic whereby all the socials constraints burst into the individual.
Thus, we have in this Etrangere (as Barthes named her) one of the most creative and, hence, one of the most revolutionaries thought the twentieth century give us.

I Have to Raise the Rating!!!
I stumbled across the three-star average for this and was appalled.Of course, it is based on one person giving a poor toss-off review and another person giving a positive review, still a toss-off.I identify with what the latter reviewer is doing here.Amazon reviews cannot do this work justice.You have to go soak this in for yourself.All I can say is that it is as life-changing as theory gets.All the rest of us can dream of being so revolutionary and lucid as Kristeva here.That is the use of this book in this era.An important use at that.

Huge - An Important and Rewarding Book
The previous reviewer clearly did not understand this intricate and admittedly difficult work in the least - it is certainly NOT an example of the "emperor has no clothes" syndrome. It is, however, achallenging and complicated work that presumes a good dealof exposure tocontinental philosophy (especially the phenomonologies of Hegel, Husserl,and Heidegger) and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis. Kristeva does animpresive and convincing - as well as constructive - job of tying togetherthese overlapping philosophical/ideolgical traditions and ties them intonotions of how a subject comes to exist as such in and through a world oflanguage... Going behind the mis-en-abime of Lacan and beyond thelinguistic monism of postsrtucturalism, Kristeva gives a living, breathingaccount of these different themes (of which the previous reviewer seemutterly unaware - but then again, philosophy can be hard)....more later...

Empty waffle
This book is an exmaple of the "new emperor clothes" effect. Only the 'clever' people can 'understand' it, and other people are afraid to say that don't undertsand, because then they will not be regardedclever. ... Read more

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To the renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein (1882--1960) was the most original innovator, male or female, in the psychoanalytic arena. Klein pioneered psychoanalytic practice with children and made major contributions to our understanding of both psychosis and autism. Along the way, she successfully introduced a new approach to the theory of the unconscious without abandoning the principles set forth by Freud. 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.

Kristeva tells the remarkable story of Klein's life: an unhappy wife and mother who underwent analysis, and -- without a medical or other advanced degree -- became an analyst herself at the age of 40. In examining her work, Kristeva proposes that Klein's "break" with Freud was really an attempt to complete his theory of the unconscious. Kristeva addresses Klein's numerous critics, and, in doing so, bridges the wide gulf between the clinical and theoretical worlds of psychoanalysis.

Klein is celebrated here as the first person to see the mother as the source of not only creativity, but of thought itself, and the first to consider the place of matricide in psychic development. As such, Klein is a seminal figure in the evolution of the provocative ideas about motherhood and the psyche for which Kristeva is most famous. Klein is thus, in a sense, a mother to Kristeva, making this book an account of the development of Kristeva's own thought as well as Klein's.

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JULIA KRISTEVA

Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria in 1941. Educated in part by French nuns, she was involved early on in her life with Communist Party youth organizations and children’s groups. Since moving to Paris in the 1960s, Kristeva has risen in stature in intellectual circles so that she is now regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the contemporary era.

EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 7: “JULIA KRISTEVA’S THEORY OF LOVE”

For Julia Kristeva, love embodies both the semiotic and the symbolic, both knowledge and joy (pace Baruch de Spinoza), both language and affect. Kristeva has written of love in a way that is not facile, demeaning, banal, stereotypical, sexist or pornographic. Her pronouncements on love are quite different from those in the ‘classic’ texts of love, such as Ovid’s poems, or the mediæval Art of Love, or Elizabethan sonnet sequences, or Stendhal’s De l’Amour, or Denis de Rougement’s L’Amour et l’occident (Love in the Western World). When Kristeva writes –

Vertigo of identity, vertigo of words: love, of the individual, is that sudden revelation, that irremediable cataclysm, of which one speaks only after the fact. Under its sway, one does not speak of. (“In Praise of Love”)

– it seems right and thankfully free of the usual embarrassment of sexism that marks most writing about love. Julia Kristeva evokes the wildness of love, the loss of self and the eruption of desire, without sounding idiotic. When Kristeva writes that in love one assumes the right to be extraordinary, it is a great description of being in love. Kristeva is right to describe love as the inrush of total subjectivity, an infinity of subjectivity. In Kristeva’s psycho-poetic reading, love’s the inrush of the totally extraordinary, but at the expense of commonsense (as lovers learn, painfully):

Love is the time and space in which “I” assumes the right to be extraordinary. Sovereign yet not individual. Divisible, lost, annihilated; but also, and through imaginary fusion with the loved one, equal to the infinite space of superhuman psychism. Paranoid? I am, in love, at the zenith of subjectivity. (5)

How great this first chapter of Histoires d’amour is, as great as Stendhal’s De l’Amour or Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id, or Jacques Lacan’s Écrits. Kristeva describes love as a transgressive, sometimes violent wildness (D.H. Lawrence’s term ‘infinite sensual violence’ is apposite here). ‘Vertigo of identity, vertigo of words’ – what a good turn of phrase. Vertigo – the falling in love, the fear of falling, the helplessness, the swoon into the abyss. Going over the edge. Moving beyond the boundaries. Transgression.

KELLY IVES has written widely on feminism, philosophy and art. Her previous books include Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous.

Customer Reviews (1)

LOVE AND ART AND MORE, OH MUCH MORE
Julia Kristeva is a French philosopher and feminist writer who has produced a huge body of work, going back to the 1960s. She is a remarkable thinker by any standards, but some of her ideas can be a little tricky and avant garde to grasp at first (the chora, the semiotic realm, the abject, etc). She uses a good deal of psychology, drawing on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, as well as cultural theory.
This book by Kelly Ives I found useful because it was clearly written, unlike too much of contemporary theoretical criticism. Ives steers clear of using jargon for the sake of it, or for showing off to other cultural critics. I mean, there are people who write about Kristeva who seem to be complicated for the sake of it, and there's no need for that (and no time for it either!).
And although Kristeva's work can be dense at times, her ideas are definitely worth pursuing. I particularly enjoy her writings on love and emotion (collected in her book Tales of Love). Kristeva has some truly extraordinary things to say about love - quite individual, quite unlike any other writer on love and feelings, but very illuminating.
As well as love, Kristeva has also written extensively about art and the artist - especially valuable are her views on the relation of making art to depression and heightened emotions. This book also explores these fascinating ideas, which say so much about being an artist - about the costs and the problems of being an artist, as wel as the joys and achievements. ... Read more

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A thorough examination of the manner in which three of the most unsettling modern writers -- Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes -- affirm their personal rebellion followed by Kristeva's own ideas on the future of rebellion.

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Intellectual exile therapy: reading
I have read several books by Julia Kristeva, but I have difficulty recalling the points that each signifies, so it was a relief to me, when I started this book, that it stated an outlook on modern society which I share wholeheartedly.For people who are growing older, reading seems to be an activity that offers fewer rewards than ever, and it becomes difficult to find any indication that authors have been gaining anything by being aware of philosophy, to pick a topic that has reached modernity with as little certainty as the physics of subatomic particles.The multiplicity of approaches and observations diminishes the opportunity for any point to be important in a system which only understands certain kinds of schemes:

" . . . European culture--a culture fashioned by doubt and critique--is losing its moral and aesthetic impact.This moral and aesthetic dimension finds itself marginalized and exists only as a decorative alibi tolerated by the society of the spectacle, when it is not simply submerged, made impossible by entertainment culture, performance culture, and show culture."(p. 4).

My review of Kristeva's book on Hannah Arendt attempted to demonstrate, by counting the footnotes in that book, how much it was merely providing a reading of the volumes of THE LIFE OF THE MIND on THINKING and WILLING.The notes for INTIMATE REVOLT show much wider interests, but this book is Volume 2 of THE POWERS AND LIMITS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS and continues reading as in the previous volume."I will explore new texts among the works of the three major authors examined in volume 1, Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes, each an integral part of the revolt of the twentieth century, and emphasize the paradoxical logic by which this experience of revolt is accomplished."(p. 3).

For those who are not concerned so much with reading, there is a chance to skip ahead to Part II, The Future of Revolt, which has its own Preface, Chapter 13, Psychoanalysis and Freedom; Chapter 14, The Love of Another Language; and Chapter 15, Europhilia-Europhobia.I had always pictured Julia Kristeva as an exclusively French feminist psychoanalyst, but Chapter 14 reveals that she is an exile whose native tongue was Bulgarian.If she could only adopt "the tradition of offhandedness--when not nationalism--toward any remedy for our century," she might actually seem French."I have so shifted into this other language, which I have spoken for fifty years, that I am almost ready to believe the Americans who see me as a French intellectual and writer."(p. 246).

So INTIMATE REVOLT turns into a book which is ultimately about issues of self, and Julia Kristeva becomes an example of someone who is trying to fit in as an intellectual because none of the other ultra modern cultures appeals to her sense of self.Revolt is a theme which ties philosophy to literature in a quest for new values that seeks to go further."The nihilist is not a man in revolt in the sense that I investigated in volume I.The pseudorebellious nihilist is in fact a man reconciled with the stability of new values.And this stability, which is illusory, is revealed to be deadly, totalitarian.I can never sufficiently emphasize the fact that totalitarianism is the result of a certain fixation of revolt in what is precisely its betrayal, namely, the suspension of retrospective return, which amounts to a suspension of thought.Hannah Arendt has brilliantly developed this elsewhere."(p. 6).

In addition to the authors previously mentioned, this book frequently delves into Christianity, Freud, and Heidegger.The intellectual method owes a lot to the subject matter:"In making a narrative out of free association in transference, the subject at once confronts what is . . ." in a way that "constitutes himself in himself for the other and in this sense reveals himself--in the strongest sense of the word, liberates himself."(p. 236).Analytical discourse approaches "the endless refraction that constitutes psychical splitting."(p. 236).

Kristeva has also written a novel, POSSESSIONS, a detective story, which she considers a low form of revolt that keeps the possibility of questioning alive.Combining "a police investigation is still possible" (p. 4) with her concern that "the arrival of women at the forefront of the social and ethical scene has had the result of revalorizing the sensory experience, the antidote to technical hair-splitting" (p. 5) she attempts to question the past in a way that produces freedom for us, as "In his reading of Kant, Heidegger reconnected with another version of freedom, anchored in pre-Socratic thought before the establishment of logical categories or values."(p. 236). ... Read more

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An easily accessible introduction to Kristeva's work in English. The essays have been selected as representative of the three main areas of Kristeva's writing--semiotics, psychoanalysis, and political theory--and are each prefaced by a clear, instructive introduction. For beginners or those familiar with Kristeva's work this is a good complement to The Portable Kristeva with a convenient selection of articles from Kristeva's earlier work some of which are otherwise hard to come by. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Changed my life
This is one of my most cherished volumes of critical theory. Any self-respecting lit student should own this tome, and read it carefully. Many useful pieces for different scenarios.

A deep look into language, religion and...
...abjection (If you also read 'Powers of Horror' by Kristeva) Quitecomprehensive altough it would be hard to make a choice in the work ofKristeva. Kristeva's work focuses heavily on semiotics and women's role inpolitics and religion. Many of the theories will stir the soul, especially'Stabat Mater' if you grew up forced into any european or western dogma.'Women's Time' is a good possible evaluation of women and politics. Freudgets thrown into this in a very different manner than one expects, whichleaves us to wonder, is Kristeva supporting the old 'Dr.' or not?

Celebrating Language and Thought
The Kristeva Reader is a good, even great, introduction to the work of Julia Kristeva.Some of Kristeva's most important works are brilliantly exerpted in readable prose by Toril Moi.Lovers of linguistics, rhetoric,literary theory, and psychology will find Kristeva's work compelling.Oneinteresting aspect of the text is that it offers the reader a glimpse intothe creative process.In an early essay, "Word, Dialogue, andNovel," Kristeva responds to the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin.Her lateressay, "Revolution in Poetic Language," shows the evolution ofKristeva's language theory.Unfortunately, in order to make Kristevaaccessible, Moi had to make some difficult choices in her editing.Aserious scholar will undoubtedly find herself looking for the completeessays in another text. ... Read more

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This book is concerned with the notion of the "stranger" -the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own- as well as the notion of strangeness within the self -a person's deep sense of being, as distinct from outside appearance and their conscious idea of self.Kristeva begins with the personal and moves outward by examining world literature and philosophy. She discusses the foreigner in Greek tragedy, in the Bible, and in the literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the twentieth century. She discusses the legal status of foreigners throughout history, gaining perspective on our own civilization. Her insights into the problems of nationality, particularly in France are more timely and relevant in an increasingly integrated and fractious world. ... Read more

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A difficult read
The most interesting sections of this work are the earliest chapters; Kristeva seems to run out of steam and stop abruptly once she begins to discuss foreignness and strangeness in contemporary culture. The writing is also very abstract (perhaps more so because it is a translation); this particular book is probably only interesting to a student of literature who is critically concerned with the figure of the Stranger in fiction and legends.I don't recommend picking this book up simply out of curiousity. ... Read more

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This sequel to Kristeva's celebrated allegory returns to the corrupt, seaside resort of a mythical town, where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarism, and good and evil are erased. Part mystery, part meditation, this engrossing tale features the return of Parisian amateur detective and newspaper reporter Stephanie Delacour (Kristeva's alter ego), drawn into the mystery of a friend's murder.Amazon.com Review
All similarities between Possessions and your average hard-boiled detective novel end with the headless corpse that shows up at the beginning of Julia Kristeva's novel. Kristeva, you see, is not your average writer of detective fiction. She is a psychoanalyst and linguistic theorist, the author of books on both language and depression--two themes she weaves through this intellectual mystery. The tale begins with Gloria Harrison, a translator who is murdered and decapitated after a dinner party. Enter Stephanie Delacour, an old friend of the victim and a journalist with a nose for murder. Though Kristeva has provided all the necessary components for a standard mystery--a victim, several suspects, and a detective--she seems far more interested in exploring the psychological issues surrounding her characters than the crime itself. The pages of Possessions are filled with reflections on motherhood, depression, semiotics, and more. So if you're looking for a mystery novel that will stimulate your brain rather than your adrenaline production, Possessions is a good place to start. ... Read more

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Dividing her essays into worlds, women, psychoanalysis, religion, portraits, and writing, Julia Kristeva explores the phenomenon of hate (and our attempts to subvert, sublimate, and otherwise process the emotion) through a number of key texts and contexts. Her inquiry spans the themes, topics, and figures that have been central to her writing over the past three decades, and her paths of discovery advance the theoretical innovations that are so characteristic of her thought.Kristeva rearticulates and extends her analysis of language, abjection, idealization, female sexuality, love, and forgiveness. She examines the "maladies of the soul," utilizing examples from her practice and the ailments of her patients (fatigue, irritability, and general malaise), and she sources the Bible and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa of Avila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O'Keefe. Kristeva balances political calamity and individual pathology, addressing internal and external catastrophes, and global and personal injuries, and she confronts the nature of depression, obliviousness, fear, and the agony of being and nothingness.Throughout she develops the idea that psychoanalysis remains key to serenity, with its turning back, looking back, investigation of the self, and refashioning of psychical damage into something useful or beautiful. Constant questioning, Kristeva contends, is essential to achieving a coming to terms. ... Read more

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"These days, who still has a soul?" asks Julia Kristeva in her psychoanalytic exploration, Hailed by Peter Brooks in theas "a critic of great psychoanalytic insight," 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. The book poses a troubling question about the human subject in the West today: Is the psychic space that we have traditionally known disappearing? ... Read more

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Julia Kristeva's best work on Psychoanalysis
One of the most renowned researchers in the field of Social Studies, Kristeva has gone deeply in the facts of the soul in our modern world, exercising her acute views on the disturbs that affect the human soul. The two halves of the book: The clinic and History lead us through a path full of novelties regarding the presence of man/woman in this world and how this very world causes so many new diseases...not only in the body, but mainly in the soul of them. Lacan and Freud would be surprised to see how their works were so consitently revisited ... Read more

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The first fully representative selection of Kristeva's most important writings of the last two decades. ... Read more

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Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Her writings have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language. Her work is unique in that it skillfully brings together psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, literature, linguistics, and philosophy.In her latest book on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Kristeva focuses on an intriguing new dilemma. Freud and psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in our contemporary "entertainment" culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom -and against what -and under what forms?Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist John Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. For Kristeva the rebellions championed by these figures -especially the political and seemingly dogmatic political commitments of Aragon and Sartre -strike the post-Cold War reader with a mixture of fascination and rejection. These theorists, according to Kristeva, are involved in a revolution against accepted notions of identity -of one´s relation to others. Kristeva places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics. The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud´s groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in hisand discussing his often neglected vision of language, and underscoring its complex connection to the revolutionary drive. ... Read more