Sacrificial promises in the time of obsession: Kristeva and the sexual contract

Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 42, Issue SUPPL, 2004, Pages 96-115

  Keltner, Stacy ^a  

^a EARLHAM COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949336503     PISSN: 00384283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2004.tb01018.x     Document Type: Review

References (38)

1. Taking the three texts of Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, and Black Sun to constitute a trilogy comprising a philosophy of modernity, this is the essential insight of Sara Beardsworth's forthcoming book, Julia Kristeva: A Philosophy of Modernity (New York: State University of New York Press, forthcoming).
2. The latter is accomplished through her reading of modern literature beginning as early as Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984);
3. Originally published as La revolution du langage poétique: l'avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle. Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974). Henceforth abbreviated RPL/RLP respectively.
4. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Léon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982);
5. originally published as Pouvoirs de l'horreur: essai sur l'abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
6. Tales of Love, trans. Léon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987);
7. originally published as Histoires d'amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983).
8. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Léon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989);
9. originally published as Soleil noir, depression et mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). Henceforth abbreviated PH/PdH, TL/HA, BS/SN respectively.
10. See especially chapter 5 of Black Sun.
11. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1979);
12. Phänomenologie des Geistes, fifth edition (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952) [1806], ¶ 10.
13. Gillian Rose reads Hegelian dialectics as a work of mourning. However, she also reads it as a work of comedy. Comedy allows for a distance on loss and is, like mourning as opposed to melancholia, the moment of formation. See Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
14. This is the focus of Kristeva's Nations without Nationalism, a text that seeks, but ultimately fails, to provide a cosmopolitan concept of the political. Kristeva valorizes French culture above all others as paradigmatic of a cosmopolitan position, thereby resulting in a violent Franco-centrism. See Nations without Nationalism, trans. Léon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
15. originally published as Lettre ouverte à Harlem Désir (Paris: Rivages, 1990).
16. Along with Lacan, Kristeva understands desire as metonymic, as a continual process of deferral. This is why the mother's desire appears to recede and allows for the possibility of a third to appear - which Kristeva calls a godsend because it makes separation and amatory identification possible (TL, 40;)
17. HA, 55-6.
18. Kristeva's Black Sun insists on a shift in our relationship to death with the rise of technologically advanced forms of violence.
19. "Women's Time," republished in New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995);
20. originally published as Les nouvelles maladies de l'âme (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1990). Henceforth abbreviated NMS/NMA respectively.
21. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
22. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997).
23. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992);
24. originally published as La Pensée straight (Paris: Balland, 2001).
25. Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment, and Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 1994).
26. Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (New York: Routledge, 1996).
27. See especially Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994)
28. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992);
29. originally published as Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes and republished in The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 1 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1962), 125-220.
30. On the Social Contract, trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 1970);
31. originally published as Contract Social and republished in The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 2, op.cit., 21-136. Henceforth abbreviated SC/CS.
32. New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981).
33. Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Léon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991);
34. originally published as Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1988).
35. Some readers of Kristeva's feminism also make the mistake of aligning the feminine (essentially) with the semiotic and the masculine (essentially) with the symbolic. See, for instance, Elizabeth Grosz's Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990).
36. I am thinking here of her Crisis of the European Subject, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2000);
37. originally published as separate essays, all included in L'infini (Spring 1999, Autumn 1998, and Autumn 1995).
38. See especially chapter 8 of Strangers to Ourselves.