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Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

In the introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir notes that "a man never begins by establishing himself as an individual of a certain sex: his being a man poses no problem." Nancy Bauer begins her book by asking: "Then what kind of a problem does being a woman pose?" Bauer's aim is to show that in answering this question The Second Sex dramatizes the extent to which being a woman poses a philosophical problem.

This book is a call for philosophers as well as feminists to turn, or return to, The Second Sex. Bauer shows that Beauvoir's magnum opus, written a quarter-century before the development of contemporary feminist philosophy, constitutes a meditation on the relationship between women and philosophy that remains profoundly undervalued. She argues that the extraordinary effect The Second Sex has had on women's lives, then and now, can be traced to Beauvoir's discovery of a new way to philosophize -- a way grounded in her identity as a woman. In offering a new interpretation of The Second Sex, Bauer shows how philosophy can be politically productive for women while remaining genuinely philosophical.

Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Full eBooks: 

• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

• Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics

Simone de Beauvoir developed her philosophy of lived experience as she actually wrote fiction. Hence Beauvoir should be placed among major philosophical novelists of the twentieth-century like Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer, and Beauvoir's theory of the metaphysical novel acknowledges multicultural traditions of story-telling and song which are not locked into the theoretical abstractions of the Greek philosophical tradition. In Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience, Eleanore Holveck presents Simone de Beauvoir's theory of literature and metaphysics, including its relationship to the philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, with references to the literary tradition of Goethe, Maurice Barrès, Arthur Rimbaud, André Breton, and Paul Nizan. The book provides a detailed philosophical analysis of Beauvoir's early short stories and several major novels, including The Mandarins and L'invitée, from the point of view of "other" women who appear on the fringes of Beauvoir's fiction: shop girls, seamstresses, and prostitutes. Holveck applies Beauvoir's philosophy to her own lived experience as a working-class teenager who grew up in jazz clubs similar to those Beauvoir herself visited in New York and Chicago.

Eleanore Holveck is associate professor and former chair of the Philosophy Department at Duquesne University. She has written extensively on the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.


Holveck offers a nuanced reading of the influences on Beauvoir thought, a careful critique of contemporary discussions of her work, and an original interpretation of Beauvoir's literature both in itself and in its importance for bringing Beauvoir's category of the other to discussions of class and race. Holveck's voice is strong and clear . . . careful and respectful; best of all it is funny and ironic. This book is a pleasure to read. (Bergoffen, Debra )

"Holveck's project is both learned and daring, identifying many literary and philosophical allusions in Beauvoir's novels and challenging the philosophical status quo. I enjoyed it immensely. It is an invaluable resource for those interested in Beauvoir's philosophy and literary writings." (Simons, Peg )

Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Full eBooks: 

• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

• Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking

The first book devoted exclusively to Beauvoir’s politics

By exploring the life and work of the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, this book shows how each of us lives within political and social structures that we can--and must--play a part in transforming. It argues that Beauvoir’s careful examination of her own existence can also be understood as a dynamic method for political thinking.

As the contributors illustrate, Beauvoir's political thinking proceeds from the bottom up, using examples from individual lives as the basis for understanding and transforming our collective existence. For example, she embraced her responsibility as a French citizen as making her complicit in the French war against Algeria. Here, she sees her role as an oppressor. In other contexts, she looks to the lives of individual women, including herself, to understand the dimensions of gender inequality.

This volume’s six tightly connected essays home in on the individual’s relationship to community, and how one’s freedom interacts with the freedom of other people. Here, Beauvoir is read as neither a liberal nor a communitarian. The authors focus on her call for individuals to realize their freedom while remaining consistent with ethical obligations to the community. Beauvoir's account of her own life and the lives of others is interpreted as a method to understand individuals in relations to others, and as within structures of personal, material, and political oppression. Beauvoir's political thinking makes it clear that we cannot avoid political action. To do nothing in the face of oppression denies freedom to everyone, including oneself.

Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Full eBooks: 

• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

• Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir

For almost twenty years, feminist readings of Simone de Beauvoir's feminist classic The Second Sex have been dominated by dismissive interpretation of Beauvoir's philosophy as Sartrean and phallocentric. Beauvoir's angry refusal to acknowledge either her philosophical originality or her lesbian relationships led to an interpretive impasse on two issues: her relationship to existentialism and her relationship to feminism. It was not until Beauvoir's death in 1986 that this interpretive impasse would be broken. Feminist scholars reacted to news of Beauvoir's death in 1986 by initiating a reevaluation of her life's work, a task encouraged by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, her adopted daughter, who edited for posthumous publication many of Beauvoir's personal notebooks and letters to Sartre. Some of the most exciting new interpretations of Beauvoir's philosophy that have resulted are brought together here for the first time; many of them, indeed, were written expressly for this first volume of essays on Beauvoir's philosophy written since her death. From phenomenology and literary criticism to analytic philosophy and postmodern deconstruction, this collection presents a unique variety of methodological approaches to reading Beauvoir: placing her within the phenomenological tradition and identifying the Husserlean influence on her work; using the posthumously published letters and notebooks to shed light on Beauvoir's own experience of oppression and to deconstruct the philosophical movement that exploited her; analyzing the themes and structure of Beauvoir's novel The Mandarins to study her philosophy of the erotic; examining the structure of her argument about women's biology and sexual difference to challenge the criticism of Beauvoir's phallocentricism; locating her writings on decolonization as a historical antecedent of the postmodern philosophy of destruction.

Margaret A. Simons is Professor of Philosophical Studies at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She is coeditor (with Azizah al-Hibri) of Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 1990).

Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Full eBooks: 

• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

• Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Simone De Beauvoir (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

'Tidd does an excellent job of linking the life to the work ... This is an accessible study that doesn't reduce of simplify De Beauvoir's work in any way, while simultaneously attempting to understand her way of living.' - Independent on Sunday 'The task of presenting a major thinker and prolific writer in such a short space cannot have been easy, but Tidd has done it very well. She has synthesized a lot of information and presented it in a clear narrative ... she expertly weaves together Beauvoir's life and the major historical events of the twentieth century and shows what impact these have had on her thinking and writing ... Tidd obviously respects Beauvoir, and this is reflected in the tactful handling of some of the more controversial aspects of her life. This is an excellent introduction to Beauvoir's work, life, and myth.' - Modern language Review 'Ursula Tidd distils some of her earlier groundbreaking analysis on Beauvoir's understanding of self and other, and resituates it in a more general appraisal of the author's life and works ... particularly helpful for students, or indeed anyone looking for a way into Beauvoir's oeuvre ... a wide-ranging and informative study.' - French Studies 'Tidd's brief survey of Beauvoir's life ends with a poignant commentary: "She sought to inscribe a path of freedom from which those who came after her could derive their own." Tidd offers her readers a roadmap to that path which is well worth following.' - Metapsychology

Ursula Tidd is a lecturer in French at the University of Manchester, and the author of Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony (1999).

Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Full eBooks: 

• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

• Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity - Full eBook

Simone de Beauvoir 1947

The Ethics of Ambiguity

---

Source: Webster University Philosophy Department;
First Published: in 1949 by Citadel Press;
Translated: by Bernard Frechtman;
Proofed: and corrected by Dawn Gaitis 2006.

---

Part I: Ambiguity and Freedom

Part II: Personal Freedom and Others

Part III: The Antinomies of Action

1. The Aesthetic Attitude
2. Freedom and Liberation
3. The Antinomies of Action
4. The Present and the Future
5. Ambiguity

Conclusion

• Full eBook: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

Slavoj Zizek: Living in the End Times

Žižek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse.”

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Žižek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times?

In a major new analysis of our global situation, Žižek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal.

For this edition, Žižek has written a long afterword that leaves almost no subject untouched, from WikiLeaks to the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.

“The most dangerous philosopher in the West.”
– Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

“Fierce brilliance … scintillating.”
– Steven Poole, The Guardian

“Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard.”
– The Observer

“Such passion, in a man whose work forms a shaky, cartoon rope-bridge between the minutiae of popular culture and the big abstract problems of existence, is invigorating, entertaining and expanding enquiring minds around the world.”
– Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

“Žižek weaves together psychoanalytic and historical materialist theories with great panache.”
– Social Text

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. His books include Living in the End Times, In Defense of Lost Causes, six volumes of the Essential Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, and many more.

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

Slavoj Žižek’s masterwork on the Hegelian legacy.

For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, whose influence each new thinker tries in vain to escape: whether in the name of the pre-rational Will, the social process of production, or the contingency of individual existence. Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the dominant philosopher of the epochal historical transition to modernity; a period with which our own time shares startling similarities.

Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new transition. In Less Than Nothing, the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj Žižek argues that it is imperative that we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs,overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought—Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.

Review
Praise for Living in the End Times: "A compendium of long passages of fierce brilliance ... Zizek is consistently penetrating." Steven Poole, Guardian; "Never ceases to dazzle." Brian Dillon, Daily Telegraph; "The thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard ... to witness Zizek in full flight is a wonderful and at times alarming experience, part philosophical tightropewalk, part performance-art marathon, part intellectual roller-coaster ride." Sean O'Hagan, Observer.

About the Author
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a Professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.

Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

Catherine Malabou, Antonio Negri, John D. Caputo, Bruno Bosteels, Mark C. Taylor, and Slavoj Zizek join seven others—including William Desmond, Katrin Pahl, Adrian Johnston, Edith Wyschogrod, and Thomas A. Lewis—to apply Hegel's thought to twenty-first-century philosophy, politics, and religion. Doing away with claims that the evolution of thought and history is at an end, these thinkers safeguard Hegel's innovations against irrelevance and, importantly, reset the distinction of secular and sacred.

These original contributions focus on Hegelian analysis and the transformative value of the philosopher's thought in relation to our current "turn to religion." Malabou develops Hegel's motif of confession in relation to forgiveness; Negri writes of Hegel's philosophy of right; Caputo reaffirms the radical theology made possible by Hegel; and Bosteels critiques fashionable readings of the philosopher and argues against the reducibility of his dialectic. Taylor reclaims Hegel's absolute as a process of infinite restlessness, and Zizek revisits the religious implications of Hegel's concept of letting go. Mirroring the philosopher's own trajectory, these essays progress dialectically through politics, theology, art, literature, philosophy, and science, traversing cutting-edge theoretical discourse and illuminating the ways in which Hegel inhabits them.

About the Author

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and at the European Graduate School, Switzerland. His many books include Democracy in What State?, Living in the End Times, and Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology.

Clayton Crockett is associate professor and director of religious studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism and Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory.

Creston Davis is assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Rollins College. He is a coauthor (with John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek) of Paul's New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology; a coeditor (with John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek) of Theology and the Political: The New Debate; and the editor of Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank's The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?

Henri Lefebvre: Critique of Everyday Life

Henri Lefebvre's magnum opus: a monumental exploration of contemporary society.

Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume Critique of Everyday Life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, the Critique was a philosophical inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France and is considered to be the founding text of all that we know as cultural studies, as well as a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. A work of enormous range and subtlety, Lefebvre takes as his starting-point and guide the “trivial” details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet one which remains the only source of resistance and change.

This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.

Critique of Everyday Life Volume One: Introduction

by Henri Lefebvre

Translated by John Moore

Preface by Michel Trebitsch

A groundbreaking analysis of the alienating phenomena of daily life under capitalism.


Critique of Everyday Life Volume Two: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday

by Henri Lefebvre

Translated by John Moore

Preface by Michel Trebitsch

Identifies categories within everyday life, such as the theory of the semantic field and the theory of moments.

Critique of Everyday Life Volume Three: From Modernity to Modernism

by Henri Lefebvre

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Preface by Michel Trebitsch

Explores the crisis of modernity and the decisive assertion of technological modernism.


Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), former resistance fighter and professor of sociology at Strasbourg and Nanterre, was a member of the French Communist Party from 1928 until his expulsion in 1957. He was the author of sixty books on philosophy, sociology, politics, architecture and urbanism.

See also:

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1967) - full book online

Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, & Bianca Lamblin

A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bianca Lamblin

In this intimate memoir, Bianca Lamblin tells the story of her menage a trois with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and their abandonment of her, a Jew, at the onset of World War II.

From Publishers Weekly

In this tell-all memoir, Lamblin evens the score between herself and renowned French thinkers-and lovers-de Beauvoir and Sartre. Their menage a trois-begun in 1938 when Lamblin was a 17-year-old student of de Beauvoir (who was 29)-ended when Sartre dismissed her, at de Beauvoir's instigation, right after the outbreak of WW II. The two women maintained a 40-year friendship after the war, but later Lamblin became enraged at de Beauvoir's humiliating account of their threesome in Letters to Sartre, published posthumously, although Lamblin's real name was not used. She also declares the two failed to appreciate the danger to which she was exposed during the war because she was a Jew, and she takes issue with many of the details in Deirdre Bair's Simone de Beauvoir. Whatever one may conclude from the affair, this memoir is fueled by spite rather than insight. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. 

From Library Journal

Arguably moving on the one hand and controversial on the other, this work involves two of the most prominent French thinkers of this century, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It is the story of Bianca Bienenfeld, a 17-year-old student who was seduced by her philosophy professor, de Beauvoir, and then passed on to de Beauvoir's partner/lover Sartre. The three lived in a menage 'a trois between 1939 and 1940, when the relationship ended and the teenager was abandoned. The shock of being let down wasn't easy for the Jewish youngster to bear, especially during those menacing and politically dangerous years. Following the war, Bianca Lamblin, now married, resumed a platonic friendship with de Beauvoir. The former teacher and student met every month for 40 years. After de Beauvoir's death, Bianca was in for yet another disappointment. In the posthumously published Letters to Sartre and War Journal, de Beauvoir contemptuously ridiculed Louise Vedrine, a pseudonym for Lamblin, who found her portrait by someone she thought a close friend vulgar, full of hypocrisy, and upsetting. Always candid, this exceptional account brings to light some intimate?and not too surprising?aspects of the life of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Recommended for large collections.?Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. 

From Booklist

Bianca Bienenfield Lamblin is finally in control of her own story. As she says, she needs at last to be the "subject" of a memoir, not the "object" of further biography. This account is her response to the 1990 publication of Simone de Beauvoir's posthumously published Letters to Sartre and War Journal, in which the author unveiled the depth of her hypocritical disgust toward her protege. At age 17, Bienenfield, a Polish Jew, entered an intellectual and sexual affair with Beauvoir, her professor at the Lycee Moliere. Soon, Beauvoir widened the seduction to include her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1940, following a two-year menage atrois, Bienenfield was unceremoniously dumped by her two lovers. Her emotional destruction served as a bleak accompaniment to the collapse of her adopted country by Hitler's invading forces. After the war, Lamblin and Beauvoir resumed a relationship that continued platonically for 40 years. Lamblin's memoir recounts the details of her involvement in the infamous threesome, balanced by the counterpoint of her later, loving marriage to Bernard Lamblin. A valuable inside look at the gurus of existentialism and a fascinating perspective of Jewish life during the German occupation. Patricia Hassler

Simone de Beauvoir - Quotes

Antonio Gramsci: Letters From Prison, Volume 1

Antonio Gramsci (1891--1937) was one of the most original political thinkers in Western Marxism and an exceptional intellectual. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom, yet he wrote extensive letters while incarcerated, rich with insight into the physical and psychological tortures of prison. In meticulous detail, Gramsci records how political prisoners, himself included, contend with the fear of illness and death and the rules and regulations that threaten to efface their individuality. Forming an incomparable link between Gramsci's intellectual passion and his emotional vulnerability, Letters from Prison shows a man reconstructing his life while being separated from it, struggling to recapture the primary relationships that once defined his identity.

Frank Rosengarten divides more than four hundred Gramsci letters into two companion volumes, complete with a chronology of the thinker's crucial life experiences, an introduction that sheds light on the main experiences and themes in the letters, biographical notes on his correspondents, and a bibliography of works cited in his letters.

The most complete and authoritative edition of Antonio Gramsci's prison letters available in any language. Raymond Rosenthal's translation... is reliable and gives a good sense of the colloquial style of the original. Frank Rosengarten's extensive notes, together with his introduction, represent a significant piece of Gramsci scholarship.
(Journal of the History of Philosophy )

These volumes are laced with political insight. They are also shrewd, humorous, brave, and resourceful.
(Terry Eagleton The Guardian )

Painstakingly edited by Frank Rosengarten and movingly translated by Raymond Rosenthal... the letters are illuminated by critical commentary that highlights the contrast between the material conditions of Gramsci's confinement and the extraordinary spaciousness of his intellectual concerns.
(Socialism and Democracy )

A credit to publisher, translator, and editor.
(Radical Philosophy )

Invaluable.... The Letters serve to confirm Gramsci's remarkable intellectual stature.... Equally apparent is the depth of his commitment to his beliefs.
(The Journal of the Historical Association )

One of the most poignant human stories of our century.
(Joseph A. Buttigieg, editor and translator of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Volumes 1, 2, and 3 )

Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment

Simone de Beauvoir, whose name is inextricably linked with that of Jean-Paul Sartre, became famous as a leader of the existentialist movement and as a member of a coterie of influential left-wing intellectuals in postwar France. Latterly, however, she was perhaps best known as a leading advocate of feminism.

Originally published in 1981, this was the first full-scale study of Simone de Beauvoir. The focus is the key existentialist concept of commitment (engagement), which is central to her thought, and its translation into action. Thus, a good deal of the book is devoted to a biographical study, while the author examines commitment as embodied in Simone de Beauvoir's ethics, politics, writings, and feminism. Apart from considering the whole span of her life and work, the book is important in the way it draws on a number of press interviews and other direct statements rather than the literary work only.

The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays

Since her death in 1986 and the publication of her letters and diaries in 1990, interest in the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir has never been greater. In this engaging and timely volume, Margaret A. Simons and an international group of philosophers present 16 essays that reveal Beauvoir as one of the century's most important and influential thinkers. As they set Beauvoir's work into dialogue with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, and others, these essays consider questions such as Beauvoir's philosophical relationship with Sartre; her ethic of the erotic; her views on marriage, motherhood, and female friendship; and her interpretations of oppression and liberation. This book discusses the full range of Beauvoir's work, including The Second Sex, her unpublished diaries, autobiographical writings, novels, and philosophical essays, and broadens the scope and interpretive context of her unique philosophy.

Contributors are Nancy Bauer, Debra Bergoffen, Suzanne Laba Cataldi, Edward Fullbrook, Eva Gothlin, Sara Heinämaa, Laura Hengehold, Stacy Keltner, Michèle Le Doeuff, Ann Murphy, Shannon M. Mussett, Margaret A. Simons, Ursula Tidd, Andrea Veltman, Karen Vintges, Julie Ward, Gail Weiss.

FULL EBOOK - Kristeva (Key Contemporary Thinkers)

Kristeva - Key Contemporary Thinkers




Julia Kristeva is one of the most creative and prolific writers to address the personal, social, and political trials of our times. Linguist, psychoanalyst, social and cultural theorist, and novelist, Kristeva's broad interdisciplinary appeal has impacted areas across the humanities and social sciences.

S. K. Keltner's book provides the first comprehensive introduction to the breadth of Kristeva's work. In an original and insightful analysis, Keltner presents Kristeva's thought as the coherent development and elaboration of a complex, multidimensional threshold constitutive of meaning and subjectivity. The ‘threshold' indicates Kristeva's primary sphere of concern, the relationship between the speaking being and its particular social and historical conditions; and Kristeva's interdisciplinary approach. Kristeva's vision, Keltner argues, opens a unique perspective within contemporary discourses attentive to issues of meaning, subjectivity, and social and political life. By emphasizing Kristeva's attention to the permeable borders of psychic and social life, Keltner offers innovative readings of the concepts most widely discussed in Kristeva scholarship: the semiotic and symbolic, abjection, love, and loss. She also provides new interpretations of some of the most controversial issues surrounding Kristeva's work, including Kristeva's conceptions of intimacy, social and cultural difference, and Oedipal subjectivity, by contextualizing them within her methodological approach and oeuvre as a whole.

Julia Kristeva: Thresholds is an engaging and accessible introduction to Kristeva's theoretical and fictional works that will be of interest to both students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

"Keltner's book is highly original, insightful, and promises to change the way scholars have traditionally read Kristeva's work."
Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University

"The book represents an engaging and original interpretation of the entire spectrum of Kristeva's work, including her often overlooked fiction. There are real gems in this manuscript, in particular a terrific and highly original interpretation of Kristeva's theory of intimacy, Oedipus, temporality, as well as of the phenomenological and ontological dimensions of her work, often disregarded by her interpreters. In short, Kristeva is a remarkable intellectual achievement."
Ewa Ziarek, University at Buffalo

"Keltner deftly demonstrates how Kristeva extends phenomenological insights in radically new directions. Her fresh, probing analysis decisively tackles the social and historical significance of Kristeva's Freudian and aesthetic standpoint. A tour de force of Kristeva's highly faceted portrait of Oedipus supports Keltner's excellent and timely elucidation of 'intimate revolt.'"
Sara Beardsworth, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity

Body/text in Julia Kristeva: religion, women, and psychoanalysis

Julia Kristeva works at a crucial intersection of contemporary disciplines: psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiotics, literary criticism, feminism, postmodern philosophy, and religious studies. This volume examines this rich body of work and the ways in which its interdisciplinary style gives insight into problems in understanding religion. Special attention is given to two related themes: the understanding of woman in relation to religion and the role of mother (especially of mother's body) in the formation of self and of a religious discourse.

Issues recurrent in the essays include the problem of ethics; the relation between discourse and the life of the body; the formation and sublimation of narcissism; the pre-Oedipal function of the father; the functions of fantasy, imagination, and art; the relation of religion to the negation of woman; and the possibility of positive and playful religion.

The themes of the relation between the symbolic structures of language and a pre-symbolic semiotics of the infant body, of the split and decentered subject, and of the opposition between desire and Jouissance (ecstatic enjoyment).participate in organizing the discussion. Abjection and sacrifice in religion, the dynamics of Christian love and faith, the relation between the doctrine of the Virgin Mary and the experience of motherhood, and the question of feminism and its sometimes quasi-religious forms are also thematic.

"What I like most about this book is that it provides a useful corrective to the overwhelming tendency to dismiss French feminism as essentialist. None of the contributors to this volume assume Kristeva is an essentialist. Some assume that she is not, while others for the most part argue for a more sympathetic and less biologically reductionist view of her work. Given the centrality of the essentialism/anti-essentialism controversy to recent feminist debates, the book presents a valuable addition to and extension of that debate, clarifying what the issues are but not assuming a common consensus." -- Tina Chanter, Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change, University of Virginia

David Crownfield is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Northern Iowa. He is co-editor of Lacan and Theological Discourse, also published by SUNY Press.

Julia Kristeva: Speaking The Unspeakable (Modern European Thinkers)

Julia Kristeva’s most remarkable contribution to modern thought has been her revelation of how pre-verbal experience - poetic, infantile, maternal and spiritual, or simply the experience of suffering - enters language through the processes of literature, art and psychoanalysis. Anne-Marie Smith’s concise introductory study examines Kristeva in the light of her contemporary activity as writer, teacher and psychoanalyst. Tracing the evolution of Kristeva’s thinking over the last thirty years she draws attention to its conceptual coherence and value as a work-in-progress of cultural critique. Smith provides close readings of the original texts, new translations and first-hand accounts of Kristeva’s lectures.

Kristeva’s influence in Anglo-American thought is set against her place in the French intellectual tradition. She emphasizes Kristeva’s involvement in public cultural activity and personal commitment to psychoanalytic practice as well as her insistent interrogation of the place of women and of foreignness in social structures.

Julia Kristeva (Routledge Critical Thinkers) by Noëlle McAfee

One of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, Julia Kristeva has been driving forward the fields of literary and cultural studies since the 1960s. This volume is an accessible, introductory guide to the main themes of Kristeva's work, including her ideas on:

*semiotics and symbolism
*abjection
*melancholia
*feminism
*revolt.

McAfee provides clear explanations of the more difficult aspects of Kristeva's theories, helpfully placing her ideas in the relevant theoretical context, be it literary theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, gender studies or philosophy, and demonstrates the impact of her critical interventions in these areas.

Julia Kristeva is the essential guide for readers who are approaching the work of this challenging thinker for the first time, and provides the ideal opportunity for those with more knowledge to re-familiarise themselves with Kristeva's key terms.

Noëlle Claire McAfee is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is also Associate Editor of the Kettering Review, a journal of political thought published by the Kettering Foundation. McAfee specializes in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, twentieth century continental philosophy, and ethics. She combines philosophic research in deliberative democratic theory with investigations in the public sphere, including new experiments being conducted around the globe. She is the author of Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Cornell University Press, 2000) and the co-editor, with James Veninga, of Standing with the Public: the Humanities and Democratic Practice (Kettering Foundation Press, 1997). 

Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony (Cambridge Studies in French)

This is the first full-length study to explore Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical and biographical writings in the context of her ideas on selfhood as formulated in The Second Sex and other philosophical essays of the 1940s. Ursula Tidd presents a detailed analysis of Beauvoir's engagement with issues of gender, sexuality and race, as part of her auto/biographical strategy in seeking to write herself into the male-constructed autobiographical canon. Tidd offers new readings of Beauvoir's unpublished diaries and recently published letters along with more well-known philosophical and autobiographical texts.