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Julia Kristeva

    June 24, 1941

    Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-born French thinker, is a psychoanalyst, sociologist, critic, feminist, and philosopher whose work delves into the complexities of language, the psyche, and semiotics. Drawing from the Lacanian tradition, she critically examines the structures of meaning and the human experience. Kristeva brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to her extensive writings, exploring themes of identity, alienation, and the abject. Her continued exploration through both academic and literary forms offers profound insights into the modern condition.

    Julia Kristeva
    Tales of Love
    Revolution in Poetic Language
    Powers of Horror
    Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death
    Black Sun
    Crisis of the European Subject
    • A gem of a personal exploration by Julia Kristeva, examining contemporary issues such as European identity, the role of religion in political life, and the meaning of equality for women.

      Crisis of the European Subject
    • Black Sun

      • 300 pages
      • 11 hours of reading
      4.1(746)Add rating

      In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion, and culture, as well as psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment lies at the very core of depression's dark heart.In her discussion she analyzes Holbein's controversial 1522 painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb," and has revealing comments on the works of Marguerite Duras, Dostoyevsky and Nerval. Black Sun takes the view that depression is a discourse with a language to be learned, rather than just strictly a pathology to be treated.

      Black Sun
    • Julia Kristeva has been both attracted and repelled by Dostoyevsky since her youth. In this extraordinary book, by turns poetic and intensely personal, she brings her unique critical sensibility to bear on the tormented and visionary Russian author.

      Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death
    • Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Celine, Proust, Joyce, and other authors.

      Powers of Horror
    • Julia Kristeva explicates her foundational distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and explores their interrelationships. Linking the psychosomatic to the literary and the literary to a larger political horizon, she questions the premises of linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories.

      Revolution in Poetic Language
    • Tales of Love

      • 414 pages
      • 15 hours of reading
      4.1(169)Add rating

      Kristeva's analysis deals with the role of narcissism and idealization in the formation of a love object. She accounts for the role of the death drive by coining the term "love/hate."

      Tales of Love
    • The Severed Head

      • 176 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the human head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--the power of horror--and expanding the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva's study stretches far back in time to 6,000 B.C.E. with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with an examination of the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical stories of John the Baptist and Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Drawing numerous connections between these "capital visions" and their experience, Kristeva affirms the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction.

      The Severed Head
    • Hannah Arendt

      • 108 pages
      • 4 hours of reading
      4.0(132)Add rating

      Kristeva explores the philosophical aspects of Hannah Arendt's work: her understanding of such concepts as language, self, body, political space, and life.

      Hannah Arendt
    • In this major study, the author addresses the need for new psychoanalytical models to cope with a moral crisis of values: a crisis resulting from a breakdown of values, a loss of ideology and deteriorating beliefs. She offers ways of coping with new maladies manifested in modern patients.

      New Maladies of the Soul