Als Idealisierung, als Erschütterung, als Übersteigerung, Leidenschaft, Bedürfnis nach Vereinigung und Unsterblichkeit bildet die Liebe die Figuration unlösbarer Widersprüche, ist sie das Laboratorium unseres Schicksals. Philosophie, Religion, Gedicht, Roman? Alles Liebesgeschichten. Von Platon bis Thomas von Aquin, von Romeo und Julia bis Don Juan, von den Minnesängern bis zu Stendhal, von der Madonna Raphaels bis Baudelaire und Bataille. Die großen künstlerischen Werke reden von nichts anderem als dem, was, Tag für Tag, im stillen laut wird.

Julia Kristeva hat eine bahnbrechende Studie zu Depression und Melancholie vorgelegt. Bereits die Nervalsche Metapher der "schwarzen Sonne" verweist auf das Düster-Gleißende ihres Gegenstandes. Kristeva gelingt es, den in der Gegenwart immer stärker aufs Pathologische abzielenden und damit verengenden Diskurs zu jenem "depressiv-melancholischen Komplex" aufzubrechen. Sie zeigt, dass in Depression und Melancholie die Quelle von Leiden liegt, aber auch und davon nicht zu trennen: von Kreativität. In den frühen Theorien von Freud und Abraham kaschiert die Depression eine Aggressivität...

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--the power of horror--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred.

Kristeva considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a...

"We found so much to say, to share, to learn.... For it wasn't just the Marquis de Sade profile and the sporty thighs-and-calves that seduced me. It was even more, perhaps, or certainly just as much, the speed at which you used to read, and still do."--Julia Kristeva

"We're married, Julia and I, that's a fact, but we each have our own personalities, our own name, activities, and freedom. Love is the full recognition of the other in their otherness. If this other is very close to you, as in this case, it seems to me that what's at stake is harmony within difference. The difference between...

Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, Teresa, My Love turns a past world into a modern marvel, following Sylvia Leclercq, a French psychoanalyst, academic, and incurable insomniac, as she falls for the sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Avila and becomes consumed with charting her life. Traveling to Spain, Leclercq, Julia Kristeva's probing alter ego, visits the sites and embodiments of the famous mystic and awakens to her own desire for faith, connection, and rebellion.

One of Kristeva's most passionate and transporting works, Teresa, My Love interchanges...