JULIA KRISTEVA

J U L I A K R I S T E V AART LOVE MELANCHOLY PHILOSOPHY SEMIOTICS AND PSYCHOANALYSISBy Kelly Ives <P> Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria in 1941. Educated in part by French nuns she was involved early on in her life with Communist Party youth organizations and children's groups. Since moving to Paris in the 1960s Kristeva has risen in stature in intellectual circles so that she is now regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the contemporary era. EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 7: JULIA KRISTEVA'S THEORY OF LOVE: <P> For Julia Kristeva love embodies both the semiotic and the symbolic both knowledge and joy (pace Baruch de Spinoza) both language and affect. Kristeva has written of love in a way that is not facile demeaning banal stereotypical sexist or pornographic. Her pronouncements on love are quite different from those in the 'classic' texts of love such as Ovid's poems or the mediaeval Art of Love or Elizabethan sonnet sequences or Stendhal's De l'Amour or Denis de Rougement's L'Amour et l'occident (Love in the Western World). When Kristeva writes - <P> Vertigo of identity vertigo of words: love of the individual is that sudden revelation that irremediable cataclysm of which one speaks only after the fact. Under its sway one does not speak of. (In Praise of Love) <P> - it seems right and thankfully free of the usual embarrassment of chauvinism that marks much writing about love. Julia Kristeva evokes the wildness of love the loss of self and the eruption of desire without sounding idiotic. When Kristeva writes that in love one assumes the right to be extraordinary it is a great description of being in love. Kristeva is right to describe love as the inrush of total subjectivity an infinity of subjectivity. In Kristeva's psycho-poetic reading love's the inrush of the totally extraordinary but at the expense of commonsense (as lovers learn painfully): <P> Love is the time and space in which I assumes the right to be extraordinary. Sovereign yet not individual. Divisible lost annihilated; but also and through imaginary fusion with the loved one equal to the infinite space of superhuman psychism. Paranoid? I am in love at the zenith of subjectivity. <P> How great this first chapter of Histoires d'amour is as great as Stendhal's De l'Amour or Sigmund Freud's The Ego and the Id or Jacques Lacan's ��crits. Kristeva describes love as a transgressive sometimes violent wildness (D.H. Lawrence's term 'infinite sensual violence' is apposite here). REVISED AND UPDATED WITH NEW ILLUSTRATIONS. <P> The text has been revised again and updated for this fifth edition. <P> Illustrated including a selection of art by Giovanni Bellini. Also available in hardback. <P> European Writers Series. Bibliography and notes. 180pp. <P> www.crmoon.com