Passions of Our Time

Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 “for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature.”Lawrence D. Kritzman is Pat and John Rosenwald Research Professor in the Arts and Sciences and professor of French and comparative literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne’s Essays (2012) and editor of the Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (2006) and the Columbia University Press series European Perspectives.Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier live and work in Paris, France. They are the translators of The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir.

Ranging from literature and the visual arts to psychoanalysis, religion, the question of women, and politics, the essays gathered in this volume deal with the experience of time in birth and rebirth, with the time of events and emergencies and, no less, with the existential dimension of time as opposed to what technologies of sensation are programmed to make of it. In her inimitable and provocative signature style, Kristeva graces her readers with brilliant readings of texts, paintings, sculptures, artists, and political events. Passions of Our Time is an excellent book.

• Foreword, by Lawrence D. KritzmanAcknowledgmentsPart I. Singular Liberties1. My Alphabet; or, How I Am a Letter2. Reliance: What Is Loving for a Mother?3. How to Speak to Literature with Roland Barthes4. Emile Benveniste, a Linguist Who Neither Says nor Hides, but SignifiesPart II. Psychoanalysis5. Freud: The Heart of the Matter6. The Contemporary Contribution of Psychoanalysis7. A Father Is Being Beaten to Death8. Maternal Eroticism9. Speaking in Psychoanalysis: From Symbols to Flesh and Back Again10. Affect, That “Intense Depth of Words”11. The Lacan EventPart III. Women12. Antigone, Limit and Horizon13. The Passion According to Teresa of Avila14. Beauvoir DreamsPart IV. Humanism15. A Felicity Named Rousseau16. Speech, That Experience17. Disability Revisited: The Tragic and Chance18. From “Critical Modernity” to “Analytical Modernity”19. In Jerusalem: Monotheisms and Secularization and the Need to Believe20. Dare Humanism21. Ten Principles for Twenty-First-Century Humanism22. On the Sanctity of Human LifePart V. France, Europe, China23. Moses, Freud, and China24. Diversity Is My Motto25. The French Cultural MessagePart VI. Positions26. The Universal in the Singular27. Can One Be a Muslim Woman and a Shrink?28. One Is Born Woman, but I Become OneNotesIndex