"Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation"
— Julia Kristeva (Black Sun)
— Julia Kristeva (Black Sun)
"When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be."
— Julia Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection)
— Julia Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection)
"Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components – that is doubtless a way to curb mourning."
— Julia Kristeva (Black Sun)
— Julia Kristeva (Black Sun)
"Admittedly more a summary of a system of thought than a witty epigram, per se, but here is Julia Kristeva from her "Hannah Arendt: Life Is A Narrative" on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt -
"Throughout the life of narrative seen as a 'quest' for shareable meaning, it is therefore not a total and totalizing work that Arendt seeks. But neither does she seek the creation of a political space that would be in itself a 'work of art.' To see the essence of politics as a welcoming phenomenality, a locus of pure appearance that has been freed from the schema of domination, seems to represent an aestheticization that does not correspond to Arendt's thought. The aestheticizing reification of politics that we can see in National Socialism does not reveal the non-political essence of the political, as was once said, but its death. For Arendt, if political life is separate from its story, which demonstrates to all (dokei moi) its conflicts, it is to the extent that political life resists its own aestheticization, sees itself as an activity (praxis) that cannot be reduced to a simple product (poiesis), and allows itself to be shared by the irreducible plurality of those who are living."
— Julia Kristeva
"Throughout the life of narrative seen as a 'quest' for shareable meaning, it is therefore not a total and totalizing work that Arendt seeks. But neither does she seek the creation of a political space that would be in itself a 'work of art.' To see the essence of politics as a welcoming phenomenality, a locus of pure appearance that has been freed from the schema of domination, seems to represent an aestheticization that does not correspond to Arendt's thought. The aestheticizing reification of politics that we can see in National Socialism does not reveal the non-political essence of the political, as was once said, but its death. For Arendt, if political life is separate from its story, which demonstrates to all (dokei moi) its conflicts, it is to the extent that political life resists its own aestheticization, sees itself as an activity (praxis) that cannot be reduced to a simple product (poiesis), and allows itself to be shared by the irreducible plurality of those who are living."
— Julia Kristeva
