Series: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

For nearly two thousand years, Hebrew belonged to the realm of the sacred. A written liturgical language used primarily by rabbis and scholars, it was not spoken in everyday contexts. A revival process in the late nineteenth century brought Hebrew back into daily use, adapting sacred texts as the foundations for a new vernacular. A "mother tongue" emerged. Keren Mock...

Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. “Of course, and as usual,” she recalls, “I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed.” Kristeva would go on to become one of the most important figures in European intellectual life—and she would return over and over again to Dostoyevsky, still haunted...

Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, first delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first essay, "Proust and Time Embodied," takes a broadly psychoanalytical, linguistically sensitive approach to Proust's exploration of time and the operation of memory. Next, in "In Search of Madeline," she delves into Proust's...

Internationally renowned as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century, the late Emmanuel Levinas remains a pivotal figure across the humanistic disciplines for his insistence—against the grain of Western philosophical tradition—on the primacy of ethics in philosophical investigation. This first English translation of a series of twelve essays known as Alterity and Transcendence offers a unique glimpse...

As omnipresent as it is ungraspable, time has always inspired and eluded attempts to comprehend it. For the early Christians and the twenty-first-century world alike, how have past and future been woven into the present? In Chronos, a leading French historian ranges from Western antiquity to the Anthropocene, pinpointing the crucial turning points in our relationship to time. François Hartog...

Antonio Gramsci is widely celebrated as the most original political thinker in Western Marxism. Among the most central aspects of his enduring intellectual legacy is the concept of subalternity. Developed in the work of scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha, subalternity has been extraordinarily influential across fields of inquiry stretching from cultural studies, literary theory, and postcolonial criticism...

A German Officer in Occupied Paris by Ernst Jünger offers a compelling glimpse into the life of one of twentieth-century Germany's most important—and most controversial—writers. Decorated for bravery in World War I and known for his acclaimed western front memoir, Storm of Steel, Jünger was a prolific author who depicted war's horrors while simultaneously extolling its glories. As a Wehrmacht...

Part autobiography, part interview, and part essay, this text traces the intellectual journey of a man often acclaimed as one of the most important philosophers in France. A guide to Deleuze by Deleuze, it explains the life and work of this figure in contemporary philosophy, tying together the strands of his long and prolific career. This guide sets forth the...

For many Jews, for more than a century, the United States has seemed to be a safe haven. There has been antisemitic prejudice, but nothing on the scale of the discrimination, persecution, pogroms, and genocide witnessed in Europe. White American ethnic violence has assailed many targets, but Jews have rarely been among them. Observing what he took to be an...

The years before the First World War have long been romanticised as a zenith of French culture—the Belle Époque. The era is seen as the height of a lost way of life that remains emblematic of what it means to be French. In a vast range of texts and images, it appears as a carefree time full of joie de...

In just three months in 1940, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France fell to the Nazis. The German occupation of Western Europe had begun—but a brave few rose up in defiance. National resistance has long been celebrated in remembrances of World War II, depicted as making significant contributions to the defeat of Nazi Germany. However, the so-called army...

Called by many France's foremost philosopher, Gilles Deleuze is one of the leading thinkers in the Western World. His acclaimed works and celebrated collaborations with Félix Guattari have established him as a seminal figure in the fields of literary criticism and philosophy. The long-awaited publication of What Is Philosophy? in English marks the culmination of Deleuze's career. Deleuze and Guattari...

This book is concerned with the notion of the stranger—the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own—as well as the notion of strangeness within the self, a person's deep sense of being, as distinct from outside appearance and their conscious idea of self. Strangers to Ourselves begins with the personal and moves outward by examining...

Desire in Language traces the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts. But the essays of Julia Kristeva in this volume, though they often deal with literature and art, do not amount to either "literary criticism" or "art criticism." Their concern, writes Kristeva, "remains intratheoretical: they are based...

In this wide-ranging introduction, Julia Kristeva presents the evolution and emergence of linguistics. For Kristeva, the object of linguistic investigation is not "What is language?" but rather "How can language be thought?" In a series of carefully documented analyses, she examines the links between philosophical speculation and linguistic practice. She traces postmodern linguistic theory back to its roots, using sources...

Underlying Julia Kristeva's Nations Without Nationalism is the idea that otherness-whether it be ethnic, religious, social, or political-needs to be understood and accepted in order to guarantee social harmony. This book is an impassioned plea for tolerance and for commonality, aimed at a world brimming over with racism and xenophobia. Responding to the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Germany and...

Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyses the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva delves into the psychological and cultural dimensions of...

Marcel Proust once wrote, "There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents' grave." Investigating the origin and significance...

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva explicates her foundational distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and explores their interrelationships. Linking the psychosomatic to the literary and the literary to a larger political horizon, she questions the premises of linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories.

This brilliant exposition of the critique of identity is a classic in contemporary philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers, Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts—pure difference and complex repetition—and shows how the two concepts are related. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising....

In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, and psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment...

Album provides an unparalleled look into Roland Barthes's life of letters. It presents a selection of correspondence, from his adolescence in the 1930s through the height of his career and up to the last years of his life, covering such topics as friendships, intellectual adventures, politics, and aesthetics. It offers an intimate look at Barthes's thought processes and the everyday...

Widely reviewed and critically praised, Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire predicts that the United States is forfeiting its superpower status as it moves away from traditional democratic values of egalitarianism and universalism, lives far beyond its means economically, and continues to anger foreign allies and enemies alike with its military and ideological policies. As America's global dominance evaporates, Todd foresees...

Julia Kristeva has been both attracted and repelled by Dostoyevsky since her youth. In this extraordinary book, by turns poetic and intensely personal, she brings her unique critical sensibility to bear on the tormented and visionary Russian author. Kristeva ranges widely across Dostoyevsky's novels and his journalism, plunging deep into the great works—and many of the smaller ones—to investigate her...

This book is concerned with the notion of the "stranger"—the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own—as well as the notion of strangeness within the self, a person's deep sense of being, as distinct from outside appearance and their conscious idea of self. Kristeva begins with the personal and moves outward by examining world literature...

New Maladies of the Soul poses a troubling question about the human subject in the West today: Is the psychic space that we have traditionally known disappearing? "These days, who still has a soul?" asks Julia Kristeva in this psychoanalytic exploration. Drawing on her many years of experience as a practising psychoanalyst, Kristeva reveals to readers a new kind of...

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles. The Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic...

We are still coming to terms with the controversial figure of Hannah Arendt. Interlacing her life and work, this book is an elegant, sophisticated biography brimming with historical and philosophical insight. Focusing on the theme of female genius, Julia Kristeva emphasizes three features of the philosopher's work. First, by exploring Arendt's critique of Saint Augustine and her biographical essay on...

This intellectual biography of Colette—the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy on female genius—represents a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century. Colette (1873–1954) was a prolific novelist celebrated for exploring sexual pleasure and inventing a language for it at a time when women writers were hesitant to address the topic. Female sexuality...

Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. "Of course, and as usual," she recalls, "I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed." Kristeva would go on to become one of the most important figures in European intellectual life—and she would return over and over again to Dostoyevsky, still haunted...