Powers of Horror - (European Perspectives: A Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) by Julia Kristeva (Paperback)

About the Book

Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Celine, Proust, Joyce, and other authors.

Book Synopsis

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

Review Quotes

Critics who seek an alternative to sexist and, in general, imperialist practices in psychoanalytic writing will want to read [this book].-- "Discourse"

Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, which theorizes the notion of the 'abject' in a series of blisteringly insightful analyses, is as relevant, as necessary, and as courageous today as it seemed in 1984.--Peter Connor, Barnard College

Dazzling.-- "SubStance"

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."