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| Passions of Our Time
ISBN: 9780231547499
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Time; Time -- Psychological aspects;
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. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kristeva Julia :
Julia Kristeva is professor of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works and novels, including The Severed Head: Capital Visions, This Incredible Need to Believe, Hatred and Forgiveness , and Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila , all published by Columbia. She is the recipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought and the Holberg International Memorial Prize.Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works. Her Columbia University Press books include Hatred and Forgiveness (2012); The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014); and, with Philippe Sollers, Marriage as a Fine Art (2016).
Lawrence D. Kritzman is Pat and John Rosenwald Research Professor in the Arts and Sciences and professor of French and comparative literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays (2012) and editor of the Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (2006) and the Columbia University Press series European Perspectives.
Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier live and work in Paris, France. They are the translators of The Second Sex , by Simone de Beauvoir. |
