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)

Perhaps no other novel has received as much attention from moral philosophers as South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace . The novel is ethically compelling and yet no moral theory explains its force. Despite clear Kantian moments, neither rationalism nor self-respect can account for the strange ethical task that the protagonist sets for himself. Calling himself the dog man, like the ancient Cynics, this shamelessly cynical protagonist takes his cues for ethics not from humans but from animals. He does (...) not however claim much in the way of empathy or understanding of animals, and his own odd motives remain a puzzle throughout the stages of his ethical transformation. Many scholars approach Coetzee’s text through an ethics of alterity, and even argue that Disgrace is exemplary in this regard. Kristeva’s rendition of alterity ethics brings us close to the novel’s vision, and yet the novel points towards a more primordial basis for ethics in the search for meaning through the human encounter with other animal species. (shrink)

In this article I critically re-examine Julia Kristeva's view that becoming a speaking subject requires psychical matricide: violent separation from the maternal body. I propose an alternative, non-matricidal conception of subjectivity, in part by drawing out anti-matricidal strands in Kristeva's own thought, including her view that early mother–child relations are triangular. Whereas she understands this triangle in terms of a first imaginary father, I re-interpret this triangle using Donald Winnicott's idea of potential space and Jessica Benjamin's idea of an intersubjective (...) space of thirdness. I argue that this space provides a maternal third term: a relation of connection and difference between two, a relation that inherits the affective, mobile, generative qualities of the maternal body as the infant (according to Kristeva) imagines it. This connecting space allows both mothers and children to emerge as subjects in their own right. I then suggest that potential-maternal space expands into language, so that language intrinsically allows the possibility of a speaking position of connection with the mother. Entrance into language need not entail separation or matricide: the problem is not language as such but the particular way that speech and logos have been defined historically. (shrink)

The philosophical underpinnings of this article are the Peircian notion of the triadic nature of the sign as iconic, linguistic and indexical, and the use of the sign as a ‘Zeug’ or thing as a means of pointing to or deixis in the context of creative activity in the classroom. This involves Lyotard's conception of desire as the generation of a space where the pupil can be affected by what the world donates. Both deixis and desire take on added value (...) in relation to the psychoanalytic theories of Winnicott in terms of the role of transitional object use in the generation of ‘potential space’, and Nussbaum's notion of tyche or being on the lookout for what the world has to offer. In terms of education, the central section of the article looks at the way these notions can be applied to teaching and learning in the secondary art classroom. This involves the use of what I have termed transitional notation, combining all three Peircian sign modes on a surface of inscription that is ‘ready-to-hand and that operates as what the anthropologist Alfred Gell termed an ‘index of agency’. (shrink)

Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language offers a challenge to theories of the subject in psychoanalysis, linguistic theory, and in philosophy. Central to that challenge is Kristeva’s conception of negativity. In this article, I trace the development of the concept of negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language from its root in Hegel, to rejection, which Kristeva develops out of Freud. Both are crucial to the development of the material dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic that makes up Kristeva’s subject-in-process/on trial. (...) I argue that a clearer understanding of Kristeva’s conception of negativity helps us to better appreciate the force of Kristeva’s challenge, both philosophically and politically. Finally I argue that Kristevan negativity also helps us to clarify the relation between the delimited space of politics and its conditions, laying the groundwork for constitutive exclusion as political critique and opening a space for the possibility of political re-constitutions. (shrink)

El artículo estudia la emergencia de testimonios de torturados durante la dictadura militar y posteriormente de testimonios de víctimas de abusos sexuales y de conciencia por parte de sacerdotes chilenos, postulando que estamos frente un nuevo tipo de testimonio que emerge de situaciones de violencia. La pesquisa realiza un análisis semiótico de estos relatos estudiando axiomas que caracterizan este tipo de texto sosteniendo que estos textos poseen una relevancia epistémica y teológica esencial para la superación de la crisis eclesial.

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 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)

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.

Foucault’s 1970–71 lectures at the Collège de France, The Will to Know, highlight the significance of themes of purity and impurity in Western thought. Reflecting on these themes coincided with the emergence of Foucault’s theory of power. This article presents the first analysis of Foucault’s investigation of purity and impurity in The Will to Know lectures, identifying the distinctive theory Foucault offers of purity as a discursive apparatus addressing correspondence between the subject and the truth through the image of relative (...) integrity or mixture. It then traces Foucault’s subsequent reflections on these themes in his later writings on disciplinary power. The implications of Foucault’s position are considered; the article will close by putting Foucault’s ideas in dialogue with those of Kristeva, and in considering the role that purity and impurity may play in resistance. (shrink)

In my dissertation, I engage in a political history of waste; in particular I look at modern philosophers from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the way that waste functions alongside narratives of civilization, progress, and perfection. I analyze the political, pedagogical, and other theories of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. I use Julia Kristevaâs concept of abjection to trace the legacies of these philosophers to the continued and continuing practices of wasting life their work (...) supports and maintains. Social contract theory must have its others, those wasted and abjected to limn the boundary of the âclean and properâ civilized order. Locke abjects waste in his theory of property and I link the use of his term âwastelandâ to the wastelanding of Native Americans. As Kristeva says the forgetting, repressing, or disavowal of abjection leads to the return of its repressed in the form of our âapocalypses.â I discuss Rousseauâs treatment of waste and the way it is ambivalently embraced, which I think is a more appropriate treatment of waste. I also compare Emile and Sophieâs education and argue that his education of women makes waste of their lives. Last, I discuss Kantâs theory of waste and race together, arguing that he redeems all waste and that he makes waste of all races except the white race. He assents to the use of people of color as means for the white raceâs ends, rather than treating them as ends in themselves. Thus, I conclude that social contract theories are wasteful of life and lives and that contract theory should be garbaged for a new political principle: to not make waste of life or lives. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that an account of epistemic injustice sensitive to interlocking oppressions must take us beyond injustice to human knowers. Although several feminist epistemologists argue for the incorporation of all forms of oppression into their analyses, feminist epistemology remains for the most part an anthropocentric enterprise. Yet insofar as a reduction to animal irrationality has been central to the epistemic injustice of both humans and animals, I propose that in addition to axes of gender, race, class and (...) sex, feminist epistemology must register the animal-human dichotomy as a fundamental driving mechanism inherent in epistemic injustice. From the perspective of a truly liberatory epistemology, I thus argue for an expanded account of epistemic injustice that is both 1) sufficiently attentive to the way injustices to human knowers continue to rely on animal oppression and 2) that accommodates epistemic injustices against animal knowers. (shrink)