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)

A comprehensive examination of Kristeva's work from the seventies to the nineties.

This article analyses the radical feminist formulations of the ‘witch’, focusing on the second-wave feminist sense of urgency to construct a political ‘we’ and to create a common identification with the historical oppression of women. The figure of the ‘witch’ represents here a dimension of (feminist) fantasy that, retrospectively, needs to be seen as a therapeutic attempt both to break through the silence and invisibility of female history and to elevate the notion of female alterity over the complementarity of the (...) phallogocentric system. Conveying the tension between past and present, the ‘witch’ becomes a crucial metaphor for herstory, that is, a form of feminist mythology constituting an alternative to the established male-centered master-story. (shrink)

The theorist and philosopher Julia Kristeva is invited to curate an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris as part of a series-Parti Pris - and to turn this into a book, The Severed Head: Capital Visions. The organiser, Régis Michel, wants something partisan, that will challenge people to think, and Kristeva delivers in response a collection of severed heads neatly summarising her critique of the whole of western culture! Three figures dominate, providing a key to making sense of the exhibition: (...) Freud, Bataille, and the maternal body. Using these figures, familiar from across the breadth of her work over the last half a century, she produces a witty analysis of western culture’s persistent privileging of disembodied masculine rationality; the head, ironically phallic, ironically and yet necessarily severed; the maternal body continually arousing a “jubilant anxiety”, expressed through violence. Points of critique are raised in relation to Kristeva’s normative tendencies-could we not tell a different story about women, for example? The cultural context of the exhibition is also addressed: who are the intended viewers/readers and whose interests are being served here? Ultimately, however, this is a celebration of Kristeva’s tribute to psychic survivors. (shrink)

In This Incredible Need to Believe, philosopher Julia Kristeva identifies the present as a time of crisis identified with ‘ideality’; historically significant cultural idealizations are failing us, leading to social and cultural breakdown, which Kristeva believes is not being addressed in ‘secular’ western societies. Remarkably, she defends the universal significance of what she defines as ‘belief’, revisiting earlier work on language, literature and the unconscious, against the background of a recent revival of interest in ‘religion’. In an introductory way, this (...) article outlines ways in which Kristeva’s analysis can help feminist readers to take bearings at this time. (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.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road confronts readers with a question: what is there to live towards after apocalypse? McCarthy locates his protagonists in the aftermath of the world’s fiery destruction, dramatizing a relationship between a father and a son, who are, as McCarthy puts it, “carrying the fire.” This essay asserts that the body carrying the fire is a sacred, incandescent body that connects to and with the world and the other, unifying the human and the divine. This essay will (...) consider the body as a sacred connection in The Road. Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach will help to explore what is sacred. In addition, their works elucidate the body as a present site of human connection and sacredness while calling attention to what is glaringly absent yet hauntingly present in McCarthy’s text: the mother. In the aftermath of destruction, primitive, sacred connections become available through the sensual body, highlighting what is at stake in the novel: the connection of body and spirit. The essay will attempt to show that McCarthy’s rejection of a redemptive framework, or hope in an otherworldly reality, shrouds spirit in physicality symbolized by the fire carried by the body. This spirit offers another kind of hope, one based on the body’s potential to feel and connect to the other. The thought and works of Ricoeur and Kristeva will broaden a reading of McCarthy’s novel, especially as a statement about the unification of body and spirit, contributing a multidimensional view of a contemporary problem regarding what sustains life after a cataclysmic event. (shrink)

In this contribution to Text Matters, I would like to introduce gender into my feminist response to Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of the capable subject. The aim is to make, phenomenologically speaking, “visible” the gendering of this subject in a hermeneutic problematic: that of a subject’s loss of confidence in her own ability to understand herself. Ricoeurian hermeneutics enables us to elucidate the generally hidden dimensions in a phenomenology of lost self-confidence; Ricoeur describes capability as “originally given” to each lived (...) body; but then, something has happened, gone wrong or been concealed in one’s loss of confidence. Ricoeur himself does not ask how the gender or sex of one’s own body affects this loss. So I draw on contemporary feminist debates about the phenomenology of the body, as well as Julia Kristeva’s hermeneutics of the Antigone figure, in order to demonstrate how women might reconfigure the epistemic limits of human capability, revealing themselves as “a horizon” of the political order, for better or worse. (shrink)