Read more
While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and transform feelings of violence and depression. Reviewing Kristevas corpus, Elaine P. Miller considers the intellectuals aesthetic idea and thought specular in their capacity to reshape depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. She revisits Kristevas reading of Walter Benjamin with reference to melancholic art and the imaginations allegorical structure; her analysis of Byzantine iconoclasm in relation to Freuds psychoanalytic theory of negation and Hegels dialectical negativity; her understanding of Proust as an exemplary practitioner of sublimation; her rereading of Kant and Arendt in terms of art as an intentional lingering with foreignness; and her argument that forgiveness is both a philosophical and psychoanalytic method of transcending a stuck existence.
List of contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Losing our Heads1. Kristeva and Benjamin: Melancholy and the Allegorical Imagination2. Kenotic Art: Negativity, Iconoclasm, Inscription3. 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 Proust5. The "Orestes Complex": Thinking Hatred, Forgiveness, Greek Tragedy, and the Cinema of the "Thought Specular" with Hegel, Freud, and KleinConclusion: Forging a/HeadNotesBibliographyIndex
About the author
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.
Report
"Deftly moving through Julia Kristevas entire body of work, Elaine P. Miller brilliantly stages engagements between Kristevas 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 Kristevas 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
