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Assuming the voices of psychoanalyst, scholar, and postmodern polemicist, Julia Kristeva discusses both the conflicts and commonalities among the Greek, Christian, Roman, and contemporary discourses on love, desire, and self.
List of contents
Translator’s Note
In Praise of Love
Part I
Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents
Part II
Manic Eros, Sublime Eros: On Male Sexuality
A Holy Madness: She and He
Part III
Narcissus: The New Insanity
Our Faith: The Seeming
Part IV
God Is Love
Ego Affectus Est. Bernard of Clairvaux: Affect, Desire, Love
Ratio Diligendi, or the Triumph of One’s Own. Thomas Aquinas: Natural Love and Love of Self
Part V
Don Juan, or Loving to Be Able To
Romeo and Juliet: Love-Hatred in the Couple
Stabat Mater
Part VI
Throes of Love: The Field of the Metaphor
The Troubadours: From “Great Courtly Romance” to Allegorical Narrative
A Pure Silence: The Perfection of Jeanne Guyon
Baudelaire, or Infinity, Perfume, and Punk
Stendhal and the Politics of the Gaze: An Egotist’s Love
Bataille and the Sun, or the Guilty Text
Extraterrestrials Suffering for Want of Love
Notes
Index
About the author
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.”
Summary
Julia Kristeva pursues her exploration of the core emotions of the human psyche through a series of philosophical and literary texts. She focuses on the role of narcissism and idealization in the formation of a love object, accounting for the role of the death drive by coining the term “love/hate.”
