In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of "the subject in process/on trial" from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this "subject in process/on trial" as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

This essay, the last in a series, focuses on the relationship between Nietzsche’s mental illness and his philosophical art. It is predicated upon my original diagnosis of his mental condition as bipolar affective disorder, which began in early adulthood and continued throughout his creative life. The kaleidoscopic mood shifts allowed him to see things from different perspectives and may have imbued his writings with passion rarely encountered in philosophical texts. At times hovering on the verge of psychosis, Nietzsche was able (...) to gain access to unconscious images and the music of language, usually inhibited by the conscious mind. He reached many of his linguistic, psychological and philosophical insights by willing suspension of the rational. None of these, however, could have been communicated had he not tamed the subterranean psychic forces with his impressive discipline and hard work. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s cardinal ideas - God is Dead, Übermensch and Eternal Return of the Same - are approached here from the perspective of psychiatric phenomenology rather than that of philosophy. A revised diagnosis of the philosopher’s mental illness as manic-depressive psychosis forms the premise for discussion. Nietzsche conceived the above thoughts in close proximity to his first manic psychotic episode, in the summer of 1881, while staying in Sils-Maria (Swiss Alps). It was the anniversary of his father’s death, and also of (...) the break-up of his friendship with Wagner, the most important relationship in his life. Despite having been acquainted with these ideas from reading philosophy and literature, Nietzsche created them de novo and imbued them with very personal meaning. Surprisingly, he never defined or explained his cardinal thoughts in his published writings, perhaps because rationally he could not. A resultant hermeneutic vacuum provoked an avalanche of interpretations in secondary literature. But could these ideas be delusions? A current definition of delusion is challenged, and an attempt is made at a limited comparison between delusion, scientific/philosophical doctrine and poetic creation. It is also argued that psychosis is a way of re-living trauma, and delusions can therefore be seen as a form of reasoning that helps to make sense of the world in a state of psychotic disintegration. Far from being false beliefs, delusions are a true expression of one’s innermost feelings and pain, albeit indirectly. The relationship between early parental loss and repeated trauma, psychosis and creativity is also explored. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 8, Edition 1 May 2008. (shrink)

The impact of feminism on men has produced both backlash and attempts to reconstruct masculinity. The Australian environmental movement, strongly influenced by countercultural ideas, is a case in which feminist pressure has produced significant attempts at change among men. These are explored through life-history interviews founded on a practice-based theory of gender. Six life histories are traced through three dialectical moments: engagement with hegemonic masculinity; separation focused on an individualized remaking of the self, involving an attempt to undo oedipal masculinization; (...) and a shift toward collective politics. This last and most important step remains tentative. (shrink)

This essay reads Julia Kristeva’s ‘novel-essay’ on St. Teresa of Avila, Thérèse mon amour, as a form of relationship to literature we can also see suggested, though not theorized, in Kristeva’s critical thought. Thérèse mon amour performs feats of interpretation and intimacy with St. Teresa’s writing that rehearse key tenets of her theology, but that also revive and re-open questions at the heart of Kristeva’s theoretical matrix, questions of narcissism and love, metaphor and language. The essay traces these questions in (...) Kristeva’s oeuvre, proposing that Thérèse mon amour exposes unexpected affinities between a Kristevan ethics of relationship and the radical dilemma of faith in St. Teresa. The two are united, I suggest, by the fraught project of writing love. (shrink)

The Deleuze/Guattari text Anti-Oedipus burst onto the intellectual scene in 1972 as a radical new means to reconceptualise capitalism and its effects. At the heart of Anti-Oedipus and its analysis of capitalism is the concept of deterritorialization, and how it evacuates identities, culture, values, and, indeed, coherent thought itself, and it makes them susceptible to the equations and dynamics of capital flows. Anti-Oedipus presents the mechanisms with respect to how deterritorialization interacts with and to an extent liberates desire as ‘desiring-machines’. (...) This philosophy of education paper applies the workings of deterritorialization and desire from Anti-Oedipus to the dynamics of contemporary climate change education and the Anthropocene. As such, it posits this dynamic as being critical to present day approaches to the philosophy of education that wish to engage with capitalism and its effects, and at the same time positively enter the climate change debate. This paper suggests that understanding the matrix of deterritorialization, desire, climate change and learning, is perhaps the most important work that can be performed in the philosophy of education today and with respect to the future. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 18, Issue 4, Page 43-61, December 2013.

One of my projects as a Research Fellow for The Institute for Theological Partnerships at the University of Winchester is the Feminist Theology and Art Forum. This project was born out of my Doctoral thesis which combines both art and feminist liberation theologies. Thus creating a methodology in which art as language gives voice to women’s experience within the theological world. The Forum so far has opened a window of opportunity for female artists and feminist theologians alike to exhibit visual (...) artwork that demonstrates their incarnational experience through the concept of Christ/a and Mary/miriam from a feminist theological perspective. There have been two exhibitions with a third exhibition this year which will have a feminist ecological/theological theme highlighting the important role that many women globally play in their own wellbeing and flourishing in connection with the Earth/gaia. This article moves briefly from personal experience, which is where all feminist theology begins, into the wider world of possibilities for women to use both art and feminist theology as a model for expressing another way of speaking their experience theologically, ecologically, socially and politically and in so doing create a space in which they too may flourish. (shrink)

Explores how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Kristeva’s body of work.

Julia Kristeva attempts to expose the limits of Lacan's theory of language by revealing the semiotic dimension of language that it excludes. She argues that the semiotic potential of language is subversive, and describes the semiotic as a poeticmaternal linguistic practice that disrupts the symbolic, understood as culturally intelligible rule-governed speech. In the course of arguing that the semiotic contests the universality of the Symbolic, Kristeva makes several theoretical moves which end up consolidating the power of the Symbolic and paternal (...) authority generally. She defends a maternal instinct as a pre-discursive biological necessity, thereby naturalizing a specific cultural configuration of maternity. In her use of psychoanalytic theory, she ends up claiming the cultural unintelligibility of lesbianism. Her distinction between the semiotic and the Symbolic operates to foreclose a cultural investigation into the genesis of precisely those feminine principles for which she claims a pre-discursive, naturalistic ontology. Although she claims that the maternal aspects of language are repressed in Symbolic speech and provide a critical possibility of displacing the hegemony of the paternal/symbolic, her very descriptions of the maternal appear to accept rather than contest the inevitable hegemony of the Symbolic. In conclusion, this essay offers a genealogical critique of the maternal discourse in Kristeva and suggests that recourse to the maternal does not constitute a subversive strategy as Kristeva appears to assume. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva attempts to expose the limits of Lacan's theory of language by revealing the semiotic dimension of language that it excludes. She argues that the semiotic potential of language is subversive, and describes the semiotic as a poetic-maternal linguistic practice that disrupts the symbolic, understood as culturally intelligible rule-governed speech. In the course of arguing that the semiotic contests the universality of the Symbolic, Kristeva makes several theoretical moves which end up consolidating the power of the Symbolic and paternal (...) authority generally. She defends a maternal instinct as a pre-discursive biological necessity, thereby naturalizing a specific cultural configuration of maternity. In her use of psychoanalytic theory, she ends up claiming the cultural unintelligibility of lesbianism. Her distinction between the semiotic and the Symbolic operates to foreclose a cultural investigation into the genesis of precisely those feminine principles for which she claims a pre-discursive, naturalistic ontology. Although she claims that the maternal aspects of language are repressed in Symbolic speech and provide a critical possibility of displacing the hegemony of the paternal/symbolic, her very descriptions of the maternal appear to accept rather than contest the inevitable hegemony of the Symbolic. In conclusion, this essay offers a genealogical critique of the maternal discourse in Kristeva and suggests that recourse to the maternal does not constitute a subversive strategy as Kristeva appears to assume. (shrink)

Illness and trauma challenge self-narratives. Traumatized individuals, unable to speak about their experiences, suffer in isolation. In this paper, I explore Kristeva’s theories of the speaking subject and signification, with its symbolic and semiotic modalities, to understand how a person comes to speak the unspeakable. In discussing the origin of the speaking subject, Kristeva employs Plato’s chora (related to choreo , “to make room for”). The chora reflects the mother’s preparation of the child’s entry into language and forms an interior (...) darkroom, the reservoir of lived experience, from which self-narratives issue. Unable to speak of their suffering, traumatized individuals need someone to help them make room for a time of remembrance, someone who is a willing and capable listener. I call such a person a healing witness . Through the mediating presence of the healing witness, fragmented memories of trauma are recreated and incorporated into self-narratives that are sharable with others. Unfortunately, opportunities for witnessing are vanishing. In the last section, I examine the failure of modern media and communication technologies to bear (“hold,” “carry,” “transport”) acts of witnessing. I argue that they perturb the semiotic. According to Kristeva, meaning arises from the dialectical tension between the semiotic (drives and affects) and the symbolic (logic and rules) and is threatened by arid discourse, psychosomatic illnesses, and outbreaks of violence when the semiotic is not represented . Unless we open technology to the imaginary, we risk losing the capacity to bear witness to one another and to create narratives and connections that are meaningful. (shrink)

: This essay offers a reflection on Arendt's notion of radical evil, arguing that her later understanding of the banality of evil is already at work in her earlier reflections on the nature of radical evil as banal, and furthermore, that Arendt's understanding of the "banality of radical evil" has its source in the very event that offers a possible remedy to it, namely, the event of natality. Kristeva's recent work (2001) on Arendt is important to this proposal insofar as (...) her notion of "abjection" illuminates Arendt's claim that understanding the superfluousness of the modern human being is inseparable from grasping the emergence of radical evil. In the final part of the essay, I argue that Arendt's "politics of natality" emerges from out of these two inseparable moments of the event of natality, offering the only possible remedy to the threat of radical evil by modifying our relationship to temporality. (shrink)

This essay offers a reflection on Arendt's notion of radical evil, arguing that her later understanding of the banality of evil is already at work in her earlier reflections on the nature of radical evil as banal, and furthermore, that Arendt's understanding of the “banality of radical evil” has its source in the very event that offers a possible remedy to it, namely, the event of natality. Kristeva's recent work on Arendt is important to this proposal insofar as her notion (...) of “abjection” illuminates Arendt's claim that understanding the superfluousness of the modem human being is inseparable from grasping the emergence of radical evil. In the final part of the essay, I argue that Arendt's “politics of natality” emerges from out of these two inseparable moments of the event of natality, offering the only possible remedy to the threat of radical evil by modifying our relationship to temporality. (shrink)

Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no place of their own, rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic and phenomenological, the paper (...) rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity. (shrink)

This essay undertakes a reexamination of the notion of the receptacle/chōra in Plato's Timaeus, asking what its value may be to feminists seeking to understand the topology of the feminine in Western philosophy. As the source of cosmic motion as well as a restless figurality, labile and polyvocal, the receptacle/chōra offers a fecund zone of destabilization that allows for an immanent critique of ancient metaphysics. Engaging with Derridean, Irigarayan, and Kristevan analyses, Bianchi explores whether receptacle/chōra can exceed its reduction to (...) the maternal-feminine, and remain answerable to contemporary theoretical concerns. (shrink)

This essay undertakes a reexamination of the notion of the receptacle/chōra in Plato's Timaeus, asking what its value may be to feminists seeking to understand the topology of the feminine in Western philosophy. As the source of cosmic motion as well as a restless figurality, labile and polyvocal, the receptacle/chōra offers a fecund zone of destabilization that allows for an immanent critique of ancient metaphysics. Engaging with Derridean, Irigarayan, and Kristevan analyses, Bianchi explores whether receptacle/chōra can exceed its reduction to (...) the maternal-feminine, and remain answerable to contemporary theoretical concerns. (shrink)

The Portable Kristeva. Edited by Kelly Oliver New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xxix + 410 pp., $21.00, £13.95 paper. The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present. Edited by Timothy Unwin, xxiii + 281 pp. £37.50, $59.95 cloth £13.95, $18.95 paper. Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. By Roger V. Gould, viii + 253 pp. $40.95, £32.75 cloth $15.95, £12.75 paper. The State of the Nation: Government and the (...) Quest for a Better Society. By Derek Bok, 493 pp. $35.00 cloth. The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History, Philosophy, and Religious Implications. By Michael Ruse, 299 pp. £11.99 paper. Economic Laws and Economic History. By Charles P. Kindleberger, xi + 191 pp. £14.95, $18.95 paper £32.50, $54.95 cloth. An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. By Michael Stanford, viii + 292 pp. $54.95, £45.00 cloth $29.95, £14.99 paper. The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain. By Kevin J. H. Dettmar xv + 276 pp. £45.00 cloth £20.50 paper. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. By Patricia Ingham, ix + 197 pp. n.p.g. The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. By Leo Damrosch, xiv + 384 pp. $39.95, cloth. Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars. By Arihiro Fukudo, xiii + 175 pp. £35.00. Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals. By Creighton E. Gilbert, xiii + 316 pp., $85.00, £76.50. Leaving the Cave: Evolutionary Naturalism in Social‐Scientific Thought. By Pat Duffy Hutcheon, xvi + 504 pp. $55.00 cloth. The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England. By M. Lindsay Kaplan Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture, xii + 137 pp. £32.50, $49.9 cloth. The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780. By Margaret R. Hunt, xiii + 353 pp.n.p.g. History Continues. By Georges Duby, translated by A. Goldhammer, xvi + 149 pp. $14.95, £ 11.95 paper. Friedrich Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. xlvii + 276 pp. $49.95 cloth $15.95 paper. Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought: From Augustine to Buridan. By Risto Saarinan, viii + 207 pp. $77.25, £35.00 cloth. Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034. By Richard Landes, Harvard Historical Studies, 117, xii + 404 pp. $55.00 cloth. Chronicles of the Vikings: Records, Memorials and Myths. Edited by R. I. Page., 239 pp. $50.00 cloth $17.95 paper. Ideas and Policies Under Labour 1945–1951. By Martin Francis, vi + 269 pp. £40.00 cloth. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings. Edited by David E. Cooper, vi + 276 pp. $ 54.95 cloth $ 19.95 paper. Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. By Max Paddison, xii + 378 pp. £15.95 paper. Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism. By Robert Chazan, xiii + 189 pp. $35.00 cloth. Umwelt‐Lesebuch: Green Issues in Contemporary German Writing. Edited by Axel Goodbody, ix + 197 pp. £35.00, £9.99 paper. Understanding Contemporary Germany. By Stuart Parkes, xxxii + 247 pp., £13.99 paper. Cultural‐Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment. Edited by Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, 314 pp. n.p.g. Reflections of Change: Children's Literature Since 1945. Edited by Sandra L. Beckett, xi + 203 £ 43.95 cloth. The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck's Double Portrait. By Edwin Hall, xxi + 180 pp. $50.00. Nineteenth‐Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass. By Katherine Kearns, X + 310 PP. £40.00, $59.95. Socrates and Aristophanes. By Leo Strauss, 332 pp. $15.95, £12.75 paper. The Clock and the Mirror. Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine. By Nancy G. Siraisi, xiv + 361 pp. cloth $49.50, £37.50 cloth. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. By Catherine Wilson, 280 pp., $18.95, £14.95 paper. Intelligence de l'anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris. By Pierre Grémion, 645 pp. 240 FF. A City in Conflict: Troyes During the French Wars of Religion. By Penny Roberts, Studies in Early Modern History, x + 228 pp., £40.00 cloth. Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. By Alison Weber, xi + 183 pp., $15.95 paper. Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530. Edited by Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, xxv + 313 pp., $19.95, £13.95, paper. The Commercialization of English Society, 1000–1500. 2nd ed. By Richard H. Britnell, Manchester Medieval Studies, xvi + 281 pp. $24.95, £35.00 cloth £12.00 paper. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. By Rogers Brubaker, 202 pp. n.p.g. (shrink)

Forty-five children between the ages of nine and twelve years, who were forced to flee their native Sudan and seek refuge in Egypt, were interviewed about their everyday life in Cairo. Phenomenological analyses of the transcripts revealed the physical, social and technological dimensions to their encounter with a new cultural world. The interviews also revealed the extent to which the children had to face racism, discrimination and social exclusion. Specific analyses of children’s difficulties in learning a new form of Arabic (...) and their involvement in play and games indicated that a refugee child develops his or her self-identity as a stranger by reflecting on particular confrontations with the new environment. Finally, comparative analyses across age groups led to the construction of a phenomenological-developmental model of the child refugee. Both the model and the findings are discussed in the context of Alfred Schutz’s (1964a) essay The Stranger, George Herbert Mead’s (1967) communicative model of the self and Binnie Kristal-Andersson’s (2000) psychological framework for understanding migration. (shrink)

A comprehensive examination of Kristeva's work from the seventies to the nineties.

This paper investigates the potential of the concept of sublimation for thinking subjectivity at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory. I first rehearse a recent argument by Whitebook that Freud’s notion of sublimation presents a nonviolent integration and expansion of the ego, which can mediate the modern dichotomy between the rational subject and nonrational impulse and desire. On this view, sublimation turns subjectivity into a site of possibility in the context of modern, rationalized thought and society. I then argue (...) that the concept of sublimation offered to critical theory in this form is insufficiently developed. Both Freud and Adorno analyze a deep-seated destructiveness of the modern subject, which turns up right at the heart of attempts to mediate the dichotomies of rationalized modernity. What is needed to counter this problem is a theory of love in which love is not separated from, but, rather, correlated with drive and desire, and can thereby get on a level with the unconscious or unacknowledged, impulsive nature of death-bearing subjectivity in enlightened modernity. A central conception in Kristeva’s development of Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea of transference love, delivers such a theory and thereby develops the concept of sublimation in the way that is needed at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory. (shrink)

: The paper shows that three heterogeneities in Freud and Kristeva (unconscious/conscious, semiotic/symbolic, and imaginary/symbolic) expose the historical emergence, significance, and demise of psychic structures that present obstacles to our progressive political thinking. The oedipal and narcissistic structures of subjectivity represent the persistence of two past, bad forms of authority: paternal law and maternal authority. Contemporary psychoanalysis reveals a humankind going through the loss of this past in a process that opens up a different future of sexual difference in Western (...) cultures. (shrink)

The paper shows that three heterogeneities in Freud and Kristeva expose the historical emergence, significance, and demise of psychic structures that present obstacles to our progressive political thinking. The oedipal and narcissistic structures of subjectivity represent the persistence of two past, bad forms of authority: paternal law and maternal authority. Contemporary psychoanalysis reveals a humankind going through the loss of this past in a process that opens up a different future of sexual difference in Western cultures.

This article deals with the issue of innovation in church tradition, more specifically in Orthodoxy. Using as an example the admittedly untypical life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, an Orthodox nun living in France after the 1917 revolution in Russia, the article shows how the creative moments of her life, which shaped the church tradition in exile, can be also viewed from a psychoanalytical perspective. With the help of French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the creative changes Mother Maria brought to church tradition (...) can be seen as the play of the semiotic and the symbolic within the Symbolic order: the maternal, imaginatively associative, less conscious and the paternal, regulated, structured and regulated. The subversive forces of the semiotic – madness, holiness and poetry – observed in Mother Maria’s life, brought new and living possibilities into the theology of Orthodox diaspora. (shrink)

Increased standardization of teacher education programs urges a reconsideration of how pre-service teacher identities are constructed/being constructed and evaluated. The purpose of my study was to examine the writings of pre-service teachers enrolled in an early field experiences course in order to identify moments in which they interacted, negotiated, and subverted the teacher-making process, which they officially enter during the semester they take this course. I approach this question from a philosophical viewpoint, and I use the theories of French post-structuralist, (...) Julia Kristeva. My analysis of pre-service teachers enrolled in an early field experience course illustrates how their language disrupts the standardized language and expectations of a teacher education program. (shrink)

This manuscript brings the early writings of M.M. Bakhtin to the contemporary concern over pluralist ethics. Generally, I argue that many ethical quandaries which individuals face cannot be ascribed to a plurality of ethics or a social indeterminacy of morals. I maintain that human valuation, as an ethics of action always already in play, refers to existing individuals'' struggles to participate in their personally proclaimed and endorsed value systems. Thus, I draw upon Bakhtin to suggest that concrete acts of valuation (...) (ethics in everyday practice) are not reducible to theoretically agreed upon ethical systems, but rather, they are inseparable from the emotional-volitional moments within the total context of my uniquely held existence. (shrink)

This essay explores the theme of sexual difference in relation to sacrifice by contrasting Girard's account of mimetic desire and cultural violence with Kristeva's extensive reflections on allied themes. Inspired by Reineke's critique of Girard the object of the paper is to generate discussion concerning the ethical implications of recognizing the play of sexual difference in any theory of sacrifice. Specifically it aims to contribute towards a subversion of the sexually specific violence of patriarchy.

A formal model of the processes of digestion in a hypothetical cell is developed and discussed as a case study of how the threefold logic of Peircean semiotics works within Rosen’s paradigm of relational ontology. The formal model is used to demonstrate several fundamental differences between a relational description of biological processes and a mechanistic description. The formal model produces a logic of embodied generalization that is mediated and determined by the cell through its interactions with the environment. Specifically, the (...) synchronization of the functions of pattern recognition and semantic attribution results in an open and adaptive learning system that is stabilized by a hermeneutical circle. The relational principles of biosemiotics demonstrated through this case study are applicable to other biological systems, as well as to the relational ontology of systems theory, artificial intelligence systems, and relativistic quantum theory. (shrink)

Essays explore the significance of Julia Kristeva’s concept of intimate revolt for social and political philosophy. Over the last twenty years, French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and novelist Julia Kristeva has explored how global crises threaten people’s ability to revolt. In a context of widespread war, deepening poverty, environmental catastrophes, and rising fundamentalisms, she argues that a revival of inner psychic experience is necessary and empowering. “Intimate revolt” has become a central concept in Kristeva’s critical repertoire, framing and permeating her understanding of (...) power, meaning, and identity. New Forms of Revolt brings together ten essays on this aspect of Kristeva’s work, addressing contemporary social and political issues like immigration and cross-cultural encounters, colonial and postcolonial imaginations, racism and artistic representation, healthcare and social justice, the spectacle of global capitalism, and new media. Sarah K. Hansen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. Rebecca Tuvel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rhodes College. (shrink)

Over the past decades humor studies has formed an unprecedented interdisciplinary consolidation, connected with a consolidation in philosophy of humor scholarship. In this essay, I focus specifically on feminist philosophy of humor as an area of study that highlights relationships between humor, language, subjectivity, power, embodiment, instability, affect, and resistance, introducing several of its key themes while mapping out tensions that can be productive for further research. I first cover feminist theories of humor as instability and then move to feminist (...) theories of humor as generative of social relationships. Though I diagnose several tensions between these approaches that require further elaboration and discussion, I conclude that feminist philosophy of humor is a crucial area of humor research that focuses on systematic oppression, political engagement, embodiment, and affective ties. (shrink)

This essay examines narratives about cadaver dissection through the lens of psychoanalytic theory in order to better understand the nature of medical students’ socialization into medicine and its implications for physician-patient communication. The theoretical framework provided by Julia Kristeva focuses attention on the nature of subject-formation in relation to abjection – that which reveals the contingent nature of the speaking self. Analysis of memoirs and other narratives by medical students demonstrates that students encounter the abject in the process of dissecting (...) a corpse, but are rigorously trained to map over this experience using the technical tools of biomedicine. Other students rely on dark and morbid forms of humor to develop a sense of emotional distance from their cadaver. This analysis reveals new insights about the nature of the gap between physicians and their patients. In particular, it indicates that this gap is not fixed or static but fluid and malleable. Physicians are always shifting between the symbolic realm of biomedicine and the affective, semiotic mode of encountering the abject. This malleability provides the key to training and educating medical students, socializing them in such a way that they are reflexive about this process of oscillation. How physicians handle the reality of their fluctuation between the semiotic and the symbolic is what will determine their ability to engage with patients. (shrink)

While ethics has become accepted as an important field of inquiry within Anglo-American critical and feminist theory, the same thing cannot be said about ‘love’. I argue that ‘love’ needs to be taken as a serious, valid and crucial subject for academic study, and that feminist theory should have a special investment in the topic. Phenomenological theories of pain and psychoanalytic theories of melancholy can provide a negative definition of love by describing situations where love has lost its objects. These (...) theories help to map connections amongst pain, love, and language, and demonstrate how language — and for Julia Kristeva, how especially literary language — can play an important role in mediating these states. I propose that ‘love’ names not only a particular qualitative relation between a self and an Other, but also a process of altering oneself that involves the creation of an unusual and seemingly contradictory spacing or distance. Luce Irigaray’s work helps us conceive of this concept as an embodied one through her concept of proximate distance. I suggest a ‘poethics of love’ as a theory/methodology that could allow us to continue to think through these complex issues in a way that ties ethical, political and aesthetic concerns together. (shrink)

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a person's identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus becomes (...) gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

A phenomenological account of an extended encounter with feminist theory in translation, the entirety of ‘Subjects through translation’ is best condensed in these three lines from the poet Adrienne Rich: it will be short, it will not be simple // You are coming into us who cannot withstand you // you are taking parts of us into places never planned. What is it like to read text after text in translation? How do familiar words become so strange? How to express (...) the dizziness, the blurring, the sharp and sometimes painful dislocations of meaning, sense? Thoughts dislodged from their usual paths begin to wander, to wonder anew. Subjects are changed. (shrink)

This article is an introduction to contemporary experimental poetry by women. It considers the reasons for the resistance to such work in this country. It refutes arguments made against it, for example that avant-garde writing is elitist or not related to women's experience. It further suggests why this writing, in particular in its complex engagement with issues of language, subjectivity and gender, should in fact be of great interest to the woman/feminist reader. In particular, it suggests parallels between the concerns (...) of this work and those of feminist poststructuralism. Above all, throughout the piece, it attempts to introduce the ‘provisional pleasures’ of the contemporary avant-garde to the reader, introducing, quoting and providing multiple interpretations of the work of several diverse writers in this tradition. It aims to provide a sense of the linguistic and formal innovations of these writings, alongside a sense of their relevance to questions of female subjectivity and of women's relationship to the dominant discourses of our time. (shrink)