Review of of Kristeva: Thresholds by S. K. Keltner and Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought by Birgit Schippers

Abstract

Reviews the books, Kristeva: Thresholds by S. K. Keltner (2011) and Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought by Birgit Schippers (2011). The value of Julia Kristeva’s work and its politics have remained controversial issues in the humanities since the late 1960s when her first essays appeared in print. In the past 25 years, critical responses to her thought have become more and more hostile and her politics have repeatedly been denounced as conservative, homophobic, Eurocentric, individualistic or, at best, naive (see, for example, Cornell 1991, Fraser and Bartsky 1992, Butler 1993). The two monographs under review here seek to renew the stakes in our engagements with her thought by offering compelling readings (and, indeed, in some cases, creative/enabling over-readings) of her writings to date. The two monographs under review here position themselves in the gap between ‘politics’ (as the discursive and institutional space of policy-making and partisan power-struggles) and ‘the political’ (as the self-reflexive agonistic space where the very identity of the polis is produced) and attempt to rethink the work of Kristeva (as well as the value of psychoanalysis) from the site of this gap. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)