Description
Book SynopsisPassions of Our Time showcases recent essays of Julia Kristeva’s that demonstrate her capacious intellect, her gifts as a stylist, and the profound contribution of her thought to the challenges of the present. Kristeva considers literature, translation, psychoanalysis, disability, gender, humanism, and universalism, among other topics.
Trade ReviewRanging from literature and the visual arts to psychoanalysis, religion, the question of women, and politics, the essays gathered in this volume deal with the experience of time in birth and rebirth, with the time of events and emergencies and, no less, with the existential dimension of time as opposed to what technologies of sensation are programmed to make of it. In her inimitable and provocative signature style, Kristeva graces her readers with brilliant readings of texts, paintings, sculptures, artists, and political events.
Passions of Our Time is an excellent book. -- Verena Conley, Harvard University
The essays and interviews in
Passions of Our Time not only thoughtfully extend and develop some of Kristeva's seminal ideas but also brilliantly address pressing contemporary issues, such as changing notions of motherhood, fatherhood, disability, and sexuality, and powerfully demonstrate that psychoanalysis is still relevant today. This volume makes it clear why Julia Kristeva is one of the most important cultural critics of our time. -- Kelly Oliver, author of
Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-BindKristeva's scope is both international and cross-cultural, reaching as far as China, and as close to Western experiences as suburbia's socioeconomic decline. * Library Journal *
Amazingly multifaceted. . . . Kristeva marks a new baseline for understanding in the humanities. * The European Legacy *
Table of ContentsForeword, by Lawrence D. Kritzman
Acknowledgments
I. Singular Liberties1. My Alphabet; or, How I Am a Letter
2. Reliance: What Is Loving for a Mother?
3. How to Speak to Literature with Roland Barthes
4. Emile Benveniste, a Linguist Who Neither Says nor Hides, but Signifies
II. Psychoanalysis5. Freud, the Heart of the Matter
6. The Contemporary Contribution of Psychoanalysis
7. A Father Is Being Beaten to Death
8. Maternal Eroticism
9. Speaking in Psychoanalysis: From Symbols to Flesh and Back Again
10. Affect, That “Intense Depth of Words”
11. The Lacan Event
III. Women12. Antigone, Limit and Horizon
13. The Passion According to Teresa of Avila
14. Beauvoir Dreams
IV. Humanism15. A Felicity Named Rousseau
16. Speech, That Experience
17. Disability Revised: The Tragic and Chance
18. From “Critical Modernity” to “Analytical Modernity”
19. In Jerusalem: Monotheisms and Secularization and the Need to Believe
20. Dare Humanism
21. Ten Principles for Twenty-First-Century Humanism
22. On the Sanctity of Human Life
V. France, Europe, China23. Moses, Freud, and China
24. Diversity Is My Motto
25. The French Cultural Message
VI. Positions26. The Universal in the Singular
27. Can One Be a Muslim Woman and a Shrink?
28. One Is Born Woman, but I Become One
Notes
Index
