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Reviewed by:
  • Hatred and Forgiveness
  • Sarah Alison Miller
Julia Kristeva. Hatred and Forgiveness. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. x + 341 pp.

In 2004, Julia Kristeva was awarded by the Crown Prince of Norway the first Holberg prize (the eighteenth-century Norwegian writer and polymath) for her contributions to psychoanalytic theory, literary criticism, political dialogue, and women’s studies. A transcription of her speech on the occasion of this award serves as an introduction to Hatred and Forgiveness, a collection of twenty-four essays, talks, and one lengthy interview that were originally presented or published between 1999 and 2004. In her Holberg speech, “Thinking About Liberty in Dark Times,” Kristeva reflects on the major themes of her life’s work, themes that are reflected in the contents of this collection: intertextuality, the distinction between the semiotic and symbolic registers, [End Page 411] women, abjection, and the foreigner. Because this collection winds through Kristeva’s recollections and recent thoughts on this broad and complex body of work, Hatred and Forgiveness will be a appealing to those already familiar with Kristeva’s vocabulary, but often inscrutable for those who are not.

This book is divided into five sections. Part 1, “World(s),” addresses the possibility of liberty and equality in the modern world, insisting on the necessity of recognizing the place of the disabled, the vulnerable, the foreign, and the sacred in order to fulfill this vision. Part 2, “Women,” collects Kristeva’s recent comments on sexual parity and sexual difference, motherhood, the Virgin Mary, and certain paradigmatic female identity formations (mother, hysteric, mystic, anorexic, bereaved, fatigued, writer). In part 3, “Psychoanalyzing,” Kristeva offers excerpts from a few of her own analytic cases that have informed her theoretical work. Part 4, “Religion,” considers the risks of loving God and the inescapability of exile. Parts 5 and 6, “Portraits” and “Writing,” present readings of the work of Georgia O’Keefe, Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, Louis Argon, and Julia Kristeva herself.

The collection’s title is borrowed from a paper, “Hatred and Forgiveness; or, From Abjection to Paranoia,” which Kristeva presented at a conference organized by the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris in 2004. In this paper, like most in the collection, Kristeva expands and re-shapes her seminal theories. She obliquely critiques the traditional psychoanalytic coupling of erotic and aggressive drives by asserting that hate—traced, however, to its infantile form of “abjection”—precedes and is later intertwined with love. Abjection, the subject of Kristeva’s influential Powers of Horror (1982), articulates the archaic coexistence of hatred and desire that characterizes the infant’s struggle to separate from the maternal body. It survives in the individuated subject, sometimes as symptom, sometimes sublimated. Here, Kristeva reveals that she borrowed the term from the vocabulary of a former psychoanalytic patient whose intense hatred challenged her, intrigued her, and ultimately drove her to formulate her views on this hatred that is fundamental to human subjectivity. How does one “treat” such a primary hatred? Kristeva finds the antidote to hatred in forgiveness, not the religious variety (which would condemn, erase, or purify it as sin) but instead the psychoanalytic (which would untangle, interpret, and liberate it as “a recognition of loss, the basic lack of all being, sense, language, and desire” [185]). Psychoanalytic interpretation thus becomes “a postmodern version of forgiveness,” a sacred sort of listening, articulating, and transforming (191).

This hope in psychoanalysis permeates Hatred and Forgiveness, and suggests that Kristeva has in recent years been focusing on healing the ills of humans and institutions that she has previously described and diagnosed. It is stirring to encounter Kristeva’s belief in this theory and practice to which she has dedicated much of her literary and professional life, and the snippets of psychoanalytic cases she shares are captivating. Yet, the brief and powerful interpretive comments she transcribes become overshadowed by her dense reflective commentary. Where Kristeva suggests to her analytic patient that [End Page 412] she may be experiencing, “[s]tomachaches like a pregnant woman,” she asserts to her readers that

In fact, in the course of her passage from the mother to the father, the girl is at the apex of her sadistic-anal drives and sets up...

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