Description
Kristeva rearticulates and extends her analysis of language, abjection, idealization, female sexuality, love, and forgiveness. She examines the "maladies of the soul," utilizing examples from her practice and the ailments of her patients, such as fatigue, irritability, and general malaise. She sources the Bible and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa of Avila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O'Keefe. Balancing political calamity and individual pathology, she addresses internal and external catastrophes and global and personal injuries, confronting the nature of depression, obliviousness, fear, and the agony of being and nothingness.
Throughout Kristeva develops the notion that psychoanalysis is the key to serenity, with its processes of turning back, looking back, investigating the self, and refashioning psychical damage into something useful and beautiful. Constant questioning, Kristeva contends, is essential to achieving the coming to terms we all seek at the core of forgiveness.
About the Author
Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Universite de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 "for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature."
Jeanine Herman is the translator of volumes 1 and 2 of Julia Kristeva's The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Her translation of Julien Gracq's Reading Writing was a finalist for the French American Foundation Translation Prize.
Reviews
A memorable source of reflections on the temptation and quest of being. * Metapsychology *
Book Information
ISBN 9780231218986
Author Julia Kristeva
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press