Revolt, Affect, Collectivity

1. Julia Kristeva and the Revolutionary Politics of Tel Quel

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pp. 21-36

In a number of interviews following the dismantling of the avant-garde French journal Tel Quel, Kristeva has often emphasized the important role that the members of the Tel Quel group played in furthering her own intellectual development (Guberman 1996, 3–11, 33–58, 257–70). And yet, her association with the journal...

2. From Revolution to Revolt Culture

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pp. 37-56

Kristeva’s book The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (1996) can be viewed as returning to a major theme of her thought in the 1970s, especially Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) with its emphasis on the modes of and resources for subversion in the contemporary Western world...

3. Kristeva and Fanon: Revolutionary Violence and Ironic Articulation

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pp. 57-75

In this chapter I hope to work out the political logic of revolt in modernity and the role of the sexed, racial subject in that logic by taking as my point of departure two different thinkers writing in different historical circumstances: Frantz Fanon’s reflections on the revolutionary process of decolonization and Julia Kristeva’s assessments...

4. Revolt and Forgiveness

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pp. 77-92

In Kristeva’s latest work, the ability to revolt becomes a litmus test for psychic life. The lack of revolt is a symptom of the flattening of psychic space in contemporary media culture where it is easier to take prozac and surf the web than it is to create a meaningful life. Still, while we no longer talk about revolution in the grand...

5. The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation

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pp. 95-111

Kristeva teaches us that we cannot think of the question of national identity— of what it means to be in a nation and to have a nationality—without reference to the psychic origins of individuals and their biographies, memories, and families (1993, 31). Such origins are not available to consciousness in the present; they involve...

6. Bearing Witness in the Polis: Kristeva, Arendt, and the Space of Appearance

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pp. 113-125

Conventional political understanding of political discourse sharply distinguishes between the public and the private, culture and nature, thought and bodies. But this conventional understanding cannot make sense of the kinds of political witnessing that go on today, that indeed have gone on for a century. In times of trouble, people testify in public...

7. Political Affections: Kristeva and Arendt on Violence and Gratitude

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pp. 127-145

More than an interest in feminine genius draws Julia Kristeva to the work of Hannah Arendt. More urgent than genius is the abiding preoccupation both thinkers have with the event of natality. Indeed, if Kant is correct that genius is the capacity to articulate the previously unarticulated and unruly, or even that which is inherently incapable...

8. The Exoticization and Universalization of the Fetish, and the Naturalization of the Phallus: Abject Objections

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pp. 149-179

The trajectory of this paper will move from Jacques Lacan to Julia Kristeva, via Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Sigmund Freud, and finally to a reading of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica. By returning to Marx, and using the moment at which he calls for a new symbolic to supplant the form of commodity fetishism, I suggest...

9. On the Border between Abjection and the Third: The (Re)Birth of Narcissus in the Works of Julia Kristeva

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pp. 181-191

And with these words, so captivatingly written by Ovid in the Third Book of the Metamorphoses, Narcissus appeared on the Western scene for the very first time. Ever since, the figure of Narcissus has repeatedly flourished and faded in the Western imagination, as the myth of Narcissus has died out and been reborn so many times...

10.Black and Blue: Kieslowski’s Melancholia

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pp. 193-207

In The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Zˇizˇek explicates Pauline love or agape as entirely distinct from “love within the confines of the Law.” The “true agape,” Zˇizˇek informs us, is “closer to the modest dispensing of spontaneous goodness” (2000, 100); and it is cinematically given its ultimate expression, in...

Contributors

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pp. 209-211