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)

This essay addresses the troubling and uncanny figure of Mother in feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, literary criticism, and real life. Readings of feminist literary criticism and the films Alien and Aliens explore the liminality of Mother and the consequences for feminist thought and practice of the persistent narrative modes (the sentimental and the gothic) locatable in all of these discourses on/of Motherhood.

This essay explores the symbiotic relationship between European modernity, its vision of woman and water. The union of these three metaconcepts is consecrated by the Ovidian story of Narcissus and his other, Echo. The West finally found itself completely through Hegel, the Ur-narcissist, who explains the immutable link between that European monopoly, history (by which he means the potential for becoming modern), and the sea. The narcissism of modernity is the great theme of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, (...) which shows how the bourgeoisie seeks to remake the entire world in its own image. Psychoanalysis, through the writings of Ferenczi, joined in cementing the connection, likening woman to the primal sea to which the male ever yearns to return. And Foucault suggests a potential conclusion from this metaconceptual constellation: that Man, a Western creation, may well disappear like a face drawn on a sandy beach. (shrink)

While ethics has become accepted as an important field of inquiry within Anglo-American critical and feminist theory, the same thing cannot be said about ‘love’. I argue that ‘love’ needs to be taken as a serious, valid and crucial subject for academic study, and that feminist theory should have a special investment in the topic. Phenomenological theories of pain and psychoanalytic theories of melancholy can provide a negative definition of love by describing situations where love has lost its objects. These (...) theories help to map connections amongst pain, love, and language, and demonstrate how language — and for Julia Kristeva, how especially literary language — can play an important role in mediating these states. I propose that ‘love’ names not only a particular qualitative relation between a self and an Other, but also a process of altering oneself that involves the creation of an unusual and seemingly contradictory spacing or distance. Luce Irigaray’s work helps us conceive of this concept as an embodied one through her concept of proximate distance. I suggest a ‘poethics of love’ as a theory/methodology that could allow us to continue to think through these complex issues in a way that ties ethical, political and aesthetic concerns together. (shrink)

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a person's identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus becomes (...) gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

The contemporary crisis in AmericanEducation that has resulted in Bush sponsoredfederal legislation for accountability andstandardized testing is the setting for anessay introducing the work of Frenchphilosopher, Julia Kristeva. The comparison isbetween an ``educated subject'' that might wellcome to be constituted in schooling at presentand a ``subject-in-process.'' In a strikinglydifferent vision of human potential, the latterindividual, with open-ended, non-perfectdevelopment, entails the possibility ofpersonal, societal and educational change.Kristeva's theory, based greatly in areinterpretation of Freud, and incorporatingthe semiotic, abjection and love, and revolt (...) iscentral. (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)

Prompted by Eryximachus’ speech about the relationship between Eros and health in Plato’s Symposium, this paper engages the nature of poiēsis as it arises in the works of Martin Heidegger, Julia Kristeva, and Aristotle. All three address poiēsis as a human activity that points beyond an individual person, and in so doing speaks to what’s possible for human life. Section I addresses Heidegger, whose insistance on the interplay between “earth” and “world” in “The Origin of a Work of Art” speaks (...) to a continuous strife at the heart of poiēsis. Section II explains Kristeva’s situating of rhythm as the unarticulated undulation driving human life, grounding any subsequent articulation in poiēsis. Section III engages Aristotle, who, in his Poetics, opens his discussion of poiēsis and mimesis through rhythmos. All do so, I submit, with catharsis—itself a kind of love and health—in view. This catharsis is seen through an affirmation of poietic possibility in art (Heidegger), the practice of the speaking subject (Kristeva), and tragedy (Aristotle). (shrink)

“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re-explain Derrida's (...) “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory. (shrink)

: I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop Irigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.

I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop lrigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.

Julia Kristeva is known as rejecting feminism, nonetheless her work is useful for feminist theory. I reconsider Kristeva's rejection of feminism and her theories of difference, identity, and maternity, elaborating on Kristeva's contributions to debates over the necessity of identity politics, indicating how Kristeva's theory suggests the cause of and possible solutions to women's oppression in Western culture, and, using Kristeva's theory, setting up a framework for a feminist rethinking of politics and ethics.

This essay critically engages the work of John Harris and Jürgen Habermas on the issue of genetic engineering. It does so from the standpoint of women's embodied experience of pregnancy and parenting, challenging the choice–chance binary at work in these accounts.

: Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The associations of maternity with antisocial nature and paternity with disembodied cul-ture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as social and lawful, and I re-formulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primary relationships as loving.

Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The associations of maternity with antisocial nature and paternity with disembodied culture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as social and lawful, and I reformulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primary relationships as loving.

This paper considers two accounts of the self that have gained prominence in contemporary feminist psychoanalytic theory and draws out the implications of these views with respect to the problem of moral reflection. I argue that our account of moral reflection will be impoverished unless it mobilizes the capacity to empathize with others and the rhetoric of figurative language. To make my case for this claim, I argue that John Rawls's account of reflective equilibrium suffers from his exclusive reliance on (...) impartial reason. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of “the subject in procession trial” from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this “subject in procession trial” as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora by reinscribing it as an intervention in the context of two important postmodern debates. The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of "the beginning before the Beginning." The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between incommensurable entities: the "demonic" and the social, desire and the Law, material production and representation. I contend: (1) that the introduction of the chora in RPL is part of (...) Kristeva's effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato's Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva's part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our transcendence to the "demonic" lies less "beyond us" than "in-between.". (shrink)

My conversion into a knower has been a long and winding road. From childhood reverie to the years of formal schooling, education has never ceased to lure me into its magical power. How do we really get to know/see/learn whatever happens on our educational journey? In this paper, I will re-trace my quest for knowledge that reaches beyond the boundaries of traditional epistemology. My wonderings will take me to explore, via Jung, the possibilities of imaginative education through Gnosis and Sophia. (...) The paper intends to weave together several Jungian discourses with their versions by other thinkers who have contributed to the fields of depth psychology, esotericism, and educational philosophy. (shrink)

This article engages with both queer theories of temporality and new materialist theories of kinship in order to analyse the reproductive politics of Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival. It does so in order to speculate on what happens to the concept of reproductive choice when time is in a loop. Arrival uses time travel to disrupt the linearity of reproduction by allowing its protagonist, Louise, to see that a future child will die an early, horrible death, yet still having her (...) choose to become pregnant. It is my contention that this narrative decision untethers reproduction from futurity in ways that might be productive for rethinking the heteronormative futurism at the heart of contemporary reproductive politics. (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)

This article characterizes the work of Native basket weaver Mabel McKay, using some of the conceptual tools of twentiethth-century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Specifically, McKay's baskets have often been described as "living;" Merleau-Ponty's account of the world as "living flesh" seems to suggest a way of thinking about these baskets as more than mere artifacts. I conclude that McKay's baskets are a powerful propaedeutic: they awaken a sense of ourselves as perceivers.

This article offers a critical reading of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘woman’s primary homosexuality’ and discusses homophobia in Kristeva’s work. If we are to draw conclusions on the merits and limitations of Kristeva’s theories of sexuality, homophobia needs to be assessed within the aesthetic and ethical contexts that typify Kristeva’s overall oeuvre. The article shows that we can apply Kristeva’s semiotic/symbolic model of signification to sexuality and argues for the construction of ‘primary homosexuality’ as the manifestation of resistance to authorized (...) sexual identity. The article also shows why the political demands to recognize lesbianism as a valid form of sexuality and especially as an intelligible lifestyle go against Kristeva’s understanding of what resistance entails. (shrink)

This article traces recent developments in European social theory and psychoanalysis on the theory of the human subject. Critically examining the recent psychoanalytic departures of Julia Kristeva and Jean Laplanche on the status of primary repression as a condition for the constitution of subjectivity, an analysis is presented of the state of the subject in its unconscious relational world. The article suggests ways in which the analyses set out by Kristeva and Laplanche can be further refined and developed, partly through (...) a reconsideration of the intertwining of unconscious representation and repression as developed in the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, Thomas Ogden and others. For existing psychoanalytical accounts the article suggests we should substitute the concept of ‘rolling identification’, the psychical basis of the shift from self-referential representational activity to an elementary form of inter-subjectivity. Rolling identifications are defined as a representational flux that permits human subjects to create a relation to the self-as-object and pre-object relations. Such primal identification, the article suggests, operates through a ‘representational wrapping of self and others’. The article concludes with a consideration of the cultural significance of primary repression, and the politicization of identification. (shrink)

This is a meditation on love and suffering, pleasure and pain. Despite common sense, public discourse and scholarship narrating these states as diametrically opposed, the lived experience of queer romantic love cannot be disarticulated from the social realities of loss and pain. Suturing love and suffering is the metaphysic of indeterminacy, with the unexpected and uncertain marking romantic encounters and ambitions with precarity and impermanence. Drawing from vignettes gained through an ethnography on queer erotics in Sri Lanka in 2016, I (...) explore how queer love manifests and perishes in the most inexplicable fashion, against the backdrop of structural violence and the vagaries of intersubjective relationalities. A sensitivity to indeterminacy enables an excavation of the elsewheres that inhere to and are conjured by queer romantic love, from the entanglements that live outside of the binaries of heterosexual-homosexual to the utopic futural imaginaries that are made possible at this site. Meanwhile, the suffering engendered by indeterminacy gestures to the precarities of elsewhere, and the transient nature of queer futurity. I engage scholarship on social suffering and romantic love to demonstrate how both corpora of literature are united at the site of the Sri Lankan queer figure, and how centring indeterminacy troubles epistemic projects that seek to know love and the lover with certainty. (shrink)

This essay explores notions of maternal desire within feminist psychoanalysis with an interest in challenging heteronormative frameworks of analysis. Providing close critical readings of texts by Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Kaja Silverman and Hortense Spillers, I trace conceptual openings through which to interpret maternal sexuality as a mobile process of intersubjectivity that is grounded in changing historical relations of experience. I argue that Spillers’ approach transforms a critical process of reading desire away from the insularities and exclusions of conventional psychoanalytic (...) knowledges towards a democratic and reflexive process of representation and analysis. (shrink)

This article relates two forms of political and cultural marginality and emancipation to a third one, which, in traditional patriarchal cultures, is the embodiment of marginality par excellence: that of the female self. It explores their similar positioning in the spatial and temporal economy of power relations in a detailed analysis of Irina Grigorescu Pana's novel Melbourne Sundays, a fictionallyrical account of the Romanian author's 11-year exile in Australia, read as a narrative counterpart of her critical approach to exile in (...) The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature. These two works describe an experience happening at the intersection between the author's national background – that of Romania – and the postcolonial one of her country of adoption – Australia – as they become relevant from her personal and professional experience as a woman writer. Exile is thus reflected in language, being spatially constructed by means of metaphors such as book, theatre, carnival, garden, which are also relevant for the process of identity formation. The argument mainly relies on Kristeva's theories, an approach motivated by Pana's own choice of the Kristevan discourse of love/hate in relation to the theme of exile in her fictional and critical works, since, as she remarks, exiles and lovers share a marginal, though at the same time essential, position in postcolonial cultures. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of "the subject in process/on trial" from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this "subject in process/on trial" as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

In neocolonial contexts of globalization, the epistemological terrain of radical diversity poses significant ethical challenges to transnational feminisms. In view of historical associations between knowledge and discourses of love which were conditioned by imperialist brands of humanism and benevolence under colonialism, this paper argues for a deconstructionist approach to conceptualizing love in relation to knowledge and for an ethics that severs the association with benevolence, instead making alterity the basis for its account.

: In neocolonial contexts of globalization, the epistemological terrain of radical diversity poses significant ethical challenges to transnational feminisms. In view of historical associations between knowledge and discourses of love which were conditioned by imperialist brands of humanism and benevolence under colonialism, this paper argues for a deconstructionist approach to conceptualizing love in relation to knowledge and for an ethics that severs the association with benevolence, instead making alterity the basis for its account.

The metaphor of the food system,dominant in current research approaches to sustainableagriculture, mirrors the productionist paradigm, whichreduces our relationship to land and food to theproduction and consumption of commodities. Theenactment of the familiar values of nourishment andhospitality is what the goal of sustainableagriculture would amount to in terms of our day to daylived experience. The metaphor of an ’’earthen bowl‘‘ asa theory of food and agriculture can ’’embody‘‘ thesevalues such that broader change might be achievedthrough embracing the idea and practice (...) of theories asnourishing and theorizing as hospitable. (shrink)

This article considers Beauvoir’s gesture towards fraternité at the end of The Second Sex (1949) by focusing on her fleeting characterisation of this future as ‘an androgynous world’. Generally, either Beauvoir’s call for fraternité is dismissed as an erasure of sexual difference and is thus seen to be politically bankrupt, or fraternité is understood to realise sexual difference. This latter reading suggests that androgyny plays no role in Beauvoir’s solution to women’s oppression, while the other view often sees it as (...) one effect of fraternité. This article takes a different position by arguing that Beauvoir affirms sexual difference and commits to an androgynous future. The article argues that androgyny is an affective mood that is constitutive of an openness in the field of possibility for living sexual difference. Consequently, androgyny plays not only a central role in fraternité, but also gestures to a future beyond dimorphic sexual difference. (shrink)

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 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.

This essay explores the theme of sexual difference in relation to sacrifice by contrasting Girard's account of mimetic desire and cultural violence with Kristeva's extensive reflections on allied themes. Inspired by Reineke's critique of Girard the object of the paper is to generate discussion concerning the ethical implications of recognizing the play of sexual difference in any theory of sacrifice. Specifically it aims to contribute towards a subversion of the sexually specific violence of patriarchy.