Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Columbia University Press (1982), Edition: Reprint, 219 pages
Description
"Kristeva is one of the leading voices in contemporary French criticism, on a par with such names as Genette, Foucault, Greimas and others ... [Powers of Horror is] an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse. The sections on Céline, for example, are indispensable reading for those interested in this writer and place him within a context that is both illuminating and of general interest"--Paul de Man, p. [4] of cover.
User reviews
LibraryThing member davidgregory
"Powers of Horror" seems to be an enlighted as well as enlightening book, what concerns moments of personal nausea or in the sublimated or attenuated form: moments of the belief, that one has to reject something, which would be deeply rooted in her/his unconscious; abjection here marks this
In Kristeva's words: "These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit - cadere, cadaver."
In the Translator's Notice, on page X, we are confronted with a quote from Stuart Schneiderman ("Returning to Freud"), which expresses the well-known search of Lacanian psychoanalysts for the object a:
"For the psychoanalysts the important object is the lost object, the object always desired and never attained, the object that causes the subject to desire in cases where he can never gain the satisfaction of possessing the object. Any object the subject desires will never be anything other than a substitute for the object a."
Kristeva's book is well developped in a Lacanian perspective but she seems to go beyond its limits, for she considers abjection, after clarifying the concept's meaning, in a comparative manner across modern literature, biblical texts and - last but not least - Céline's prose as a major psychological tendency which can be evaluated not only in individuals, but in collectivities.
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borderland of repulsiveness, in which the schizophrenic process has such fertile grounds to develop. In Kristeva's words: "These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit - cadere, cadaver."
In the Translator's Notice, on page X, we are confronted with a quote from Stuart Schneiderman ("Returning to Freud"), which expresses the well-known search of Lacanian psychoanalysts for the object a:
"For the psychoanalysts the important object is the lost object, the object always desired and never attained, the object that causes the subject to desire in cases where he can never gain the satisfaction of possessing the object. Any object the subject desires will never be anything other than a substitute for the object a."
Kristeva's book is well developped in a Lacanian perspective but she seems to go beyond its limits, for she considers abjection, after clarifying the concept's meaning, in a comparative manner across modern literature, biblical texts and - last but not least - Céline's prose as a major psychological tendency which can be evaluated not only in individuals, but in collectivities.
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Subjects
Language
Original language
French
Physical description
219 p.; 8.95 x 0.61 inches
ISBN
0231053479 / 9780231053471