In cases of depression where linguistic meaning has collapsed, there is good reason to believe that a long-term strategy for recovery must include rehabilitating the depressive person's capacity for meaningful speech. This requires that the patient participate actively in interpreting her own pain. In this essay, I argue that medical diagnosis can tempt patients, particularly women, to circumvent this process of interpretation. To explain this danger, I draw on Julia Kristeva's clinical analyses of depression and recent studies on the correlation between depression and self-silencing.

The Omnipotent Word of Medical Diagnosis and the Silence of Depression: An Argument for Kristeva's Therapeutic Approach

Morphing moonlight : gender, masks and carnival mayhem: the figure of Pierrot in Giraud, Ensor, Dowson and Beardsley

Between Fear and Fascination: The Horrific in Women’s Contemporary Video Installation

This study examines the development of Julia Kristeva's thought on religion and its relevance to her critique of modernity. The study argues that Kristeva's concern with the 'crisis of religion' occupies a central place in her work and permeates all of her inquiries into the linguistic, textual, literary, epistemological, subjective, social, political, and ethical dimensions of what she considers an all-encompassing 'crisis of meaning' in contemporary Western culture.%%%%Chapter one considers the manner in which Kristeva's early textual practice emphasizes the necessity of a multifaceted response to the 'crisis of meaning' by situating her concepts of negativity, productivity, ambiguity and intertextuality between Maurice Blanchot's thought of the neuter and Jacques Derrida's thought of differance.%%%%Chapter two addresses Kristeva's effort to affirm the capacity of modern literature to inscribe a new experience of meaning into the metaphysical void left in the wake of the 'death of God', with particular attention paid to the distinct ways in which she and Blanchot conceptualize the correspondence between literary experience and the experience of atheism.%%%%Chapter three explores the critical tensions that accompany Kristeva's psychoanalytic engagement with religious texts and her changing assessment of their significance for the experience of contemporary subjectivity. The chapter also examines the proximity between Derrida's encounter with negative theology and Kristeva's encounter with 'the unnamable' at the intersection of psychoanalytic and religious language.%%%%Chapter four investigates Kristeva's analysis of the 'crisis of secularism' at the turn of the millennium as well as her growing concern with the reduction of human knowledge and experience to techno-scientific and economic logic in late modernity, the limits and possibilities of liberal democracy, and the necessity of a fundamental reassessment of the religious dimensions of Western humanism.%%%%Seen as a major thread that links all of her critical endeavors, Kristeva's engagement with religion allows for a better understanding of the nuances, transformations, and impasses of her thought. Consequently, this inquiry opens new questions concerning the 'religious' character of the 'speaking subject', offers extensive contributions to a critical reconsideration of the social, political, and ethical implications of the relationship between religion and secularism, and draws attention to the indispensability of an elaborate cultural encounter between religious and humanist discourses in the 21st century.%%%%Cette these a pour but d'examiner le developpement du concept de religion chez Kristeva et d'analyser son importance par rapport a la critique kristevienne de la modernite. Dans cette etude, nous proposons que la 'crise de la religion' impregne l'analyse kristevienne de la 'crise du sens' dans la societe occidentale actuelle. Ainsi, la 'crise de la religion' est d'une importance primordiale dans l'uvre kristevienne, se manifestant a tous les …

Religion, atheism, and the crisis of meaning in Julia Kristeva's critique of modernity

`To Gaze, To See; To See: Perchance To Look...': On Vision, Surrealism and Other French Insights:

T he Kristevan critique of postmodernity sees literature as having become-at the level of style-a minimal, colorless writing, where death is the same as life and opposites generally slide into one another with complete indifference. The Durassian oeuvre is the prototype of such writing where madness emerges completely rationally, and meaning and feelings coalesce in trivia and profundity "without tragedy or enthusiasm" "in the frigid insignificance of a psychic torpor-the minimal, but also the ultimate sign of grief and ravishment" (Kristeva, Soleil noir 236).1 Here, the "eros" of poetic language-the "music in letters," as our epigraph says-has evaporated and given way to "a whiteness of meaning" (264). Does this Kristevan assessment truly capture something fundamental in the West's postmodern fin de siecle? This question serves as the focus of the reflection in the following pages. But rather than giving an answer to it, I intend to begin sketching out the dynamics of the issues surrounding it.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1354096.pdf

John Lechte

Papers

Kristeva's "Soleil noir" and Postmodernity