Powers of Horror

Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231561415
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
In Powers of Horror, 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 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

Pouvoirs de L'horreur (English)

Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231053471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse."

Classic Readings on Monster Theory

Author: Asa Simon Mittman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781641899482
Category : Monsters
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Book Description
"Undergraduate and graduate courses on monsters are becoming widespread as many disciplines use monsters to think about what it means to be human. To date no source collection on the literature of the monstrous exists, and this first volume of two offers the seminal essays on monster theory. The texts exemplify their period or genre, and have proved influential as exemplars for further cultural appropriations. Each work is preceded by a critical introduction, reading questions, notes and further reading - all valuable introductory material for students. Accompanied by a second volume of primary source material and an instructor's website, this text will prove essential reading for students and scholars alike."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Abject Visions

Author: Rina Arya
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780719096280
Category : Abjection in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
An impressive list of authors examine how abjection can be discussed in relation to a host of different subjects, including marginality and gender.

Global Powers of Horror

Author: Francois Debrix
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317533836
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Book Description
Global Powers of Horror examines contemporary regimes of horror, into horror’s intricacies, and into their deployment on and through human bodies and body parts. To track horror’s work, what horror decomposes and, perhaps, recomposes, Debrix goes beyond the idea of the integrality and integrity of the human body and it brings the focus on parts, pieces, or fragments of bodies and lives. Looking at horror’s production of bodily fragments, both against and beyond humanity, the book is also about horror’s own attempt at re-forming or re-creating matter, from the perspective of post-human, non-human, and inhuman fragmentation. Through several contemporary instances of dismantling of human bodies and pulverization of body parts, this book makes several interrelated theoretical contributions. It works with contemporary post-(geo)political figures of horror—faces of concentration camp dwellers, body parts of victims of terror attacks, the outcome of suicide bombings, graphic reports of beheadings, re-compositions of melted and mingled remnants of non-human and human matter after 9/11—to challenge regimes of terror and security that seek to forcefully and ideologically reaffirm a biopolitics and thanatopolitics of human life in order to anchor today’s often devastating deployments of the metaphysics of substance. Critically enabling one to see how security and terror form a (geo)political continuum of violent mobilization, utilization, and often destruction of human and non-human bodies and lives, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of bio politics, international relations and security studies.

The Severed Head

Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231157207
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) offers an extended consideration of artistic figurations of the severed head, the organizing theme to an exhibition she coordinated at the Louvre in 1998. Though she follows a single historical trajectory, moving from Paleolithic skull cults to antique Greek sculpture to the Surrealist drawings, Kristeva eschews the disciplinary constraints of art history, instead employing psychoanalysis to explore the intertwined problems of representation and mortality posed by the severed head. For Kristeva, the capacity to figure the life of the mind first requires a confrontation with this horrific object that stands at the boundary between life and death, registering not only the loss of corporeal form but also subjective interiority. Though this book does not engage with recent images of decapitation, it is not without contemporary political-cultural import; for Kristeva, these cruel artistic figurations offer us the capacity to contemplate the sacred within a technology-driven contemporary visual culture. Verdict While a challenging text, this beautifully written and richly layered meditation on mortality and representation will undoubtedly appeal to those readers interested in semiotic and psychoanalytically informed readings of art.-Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.(c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Temps Sensible

Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231102506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Book Description
Not only a meditation on Proust, this is a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation. Kristeva uses Proust as a starting point to reflect upon broader notions of character, time, sensation, metaphor, and history.

Abjection Incorporated

Author: Maggie Hennefeld
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478003413
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics. They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for radically new politics. Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvère Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo

The Kristeva Reader

Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231063258
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
An easily accessible introduction to Kristeva's work in English. The essays have been selected as representative of the three main areas of Kristeva's writing--semiotics, psychoanalysis, and political theory--and are each prefaced by a clear, instructive introduction. For beginners or those familiar with Kristeva's work this is a good complement to The Portable Kristeva with a convenient selection of articles from Kristeva's earlier work some of which are otherwise hard to come by.

The Portable Kristeva

Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231518064
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 509

Book Description
As a linguist, Julia Kristeva has pioneered a revolutionary theory of the sign in its relation to social and political emancipation; as a practicing psychoanalyst, she has produced work on the nature of the human subject and sexuality, and on the "new maladies" of today's neurotic. The Portable Kristeva is the only fully comprehensive compilation of Kristeva's key writings. The second edition includes added material from Kristeva's most important works of the past five years, including The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Intimate Revolt, and Hannah Arendt. Editor Kelly Oliver has also added new material to the introduction, summarizing Kristeva's latest intellectual endeavors and updating the bibliography.