Head Cases

Elaine P. Miller was educated in Saudi Arabia, India, and Turkey before returning to the United States to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from DePaul University. She is professor of philosophy at Miami University, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century German philosophy, aesthetics, and contemporary European feminist theory. She is the author of The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine and the coeditor of Returning to Irigaray.

Deftly moving through Julia Kristeva's entire body of work, Elaine P. Miller brilliantly stages engagements between Kristeva's thought and that of Adorno, Arendt, Augustine, Benjamin, Freud, Green, Hegel, Kant, Klein, Lacan, and Proust, among others. Her analysis also sheds light on some of Kristeva's most intractable concepts, including negativity, the uncanny, time, the semiotic, mimesis, art, and the aesthetic. Head Cases is filled with keen insights, rigorous scholarship, and beautiful prose. -- Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University By drawing on both the history of philosophical aesthetics and psychoanalysis, Head Cases makes an important contribution to contemporary aesthetic theory and Julia Kristeva studies. As a Kristeva scholar who is also interested in aesthetics, I am very pleased to say that this is simply the best book combining both of these fields. -- Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism Head Cases is a wonderfully engaging work-lucid, subtle, and invigorating. It will be indispensable for all readers of Kristeva and for anyone preoccupied with the concept of melancholia as a psychological, political, and aesthetic category. -- Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto Ambitious and widely-read... French Studies

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Losing our Heads 1. Kristeva and Benjamin: Melancholy and the Allegorical Imagination 2. Kenotic Art: Negativity, Iconoclasm, Inscription 3. To Be and Remain Foreign: Tarrying with L'Inquietante Etrangete Alongside Arendt and Kafka 4. Sublimating Maman: Experience, Time, and the Re-erotization of Existence in Kristeva's Reading of Marcel Proust 5. The "Orestes Complex": Thinking Hatred, Forgiveness, Greek Tragedy, and the Cinema of the "Thought Specular" with Hegel, Freud, and Klein Conclusion: Forging a Head Notes Bibliography Index