Editor’s foreword. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Julia Kristeva’s intellectual trajectory. The focus of reading. Part 1: Context and influences 1. ‘Too French...’? Setting the intellectual scene. Frenchness. Thought and its concerns in France. A paradise for intellectuals? The other side of reality and the limits of writing. The missed (Anglo-Franco) encounter 2. The effect of the unconscious. Language and the unconscious system. The baroque. The unconscious as a purloined letter. The psychoanalytic triangle. The unconscious as symbolic. Speaking ‘about’ the unconscious. The letter as destiny (death) and poetry. Psychoanalysing Hamlet. Art and subjectivity. Joyce and the limits of signification. The unsymbolizable. His Majesty’s blindness 3. Towards the semiotic. Roland Barthes. Emile Benviste. Georges Bataille. Anagrams. Exile, foreigner and cosmopolitan Part 2: A reading of Kristeva’s oeuvre 4. Writing. Dialogue. The infinite 5. The semiotic in poetic language and history. Painting rhythm. The ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’. The semiotic disposition. Poetic language in history and society 6. Horror, love, melancholy. Horror. Love. Melancholy Part 3: Conclusion 7. The importance of Kristeva. Feminism: for and against. From modernism to postmodernism? The power of the analyst? Art and analysis. Select bibliography. Index.
Biography
Lechte, John
