{"title":"Art, Mysticism, and the Other: Kristeva’s Adel and Teresa","authors":"E. P. Miller","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.857","url":null,"abstract":"Kristeva's Teresa My Love concerns the life and thought of a 16th century Spanish mystic, written in the form of a novel. Yet the theme of another kind of foreigner, equally exotic but this time threatening, pops up unexpectedly and disappears several times during the course of the novel. At the very beginning of the story, the 21st century narrator, psychoanalyst Sylvia Leclerque, encounters a young woman in a headscarf, whom Kristeva describes as an IT engineer, who speaks out, explaining that \"she and her God were one and that the veil was the immovable sign of this 'union,' which she wished to publicize in order to definitively 'fix it' in herself and in the eyes of others.\" In this paper I ask what difference Kristeva discerns between these two women, a distinction that apparently makes Teresa's immanence simultaneously a transcendence, but transforms a Muslim woman in a headscarf immediately into an imagined suicide bomber. Despite the problematic aspects of this comparison, we can learn something from them about Kristeva's ideas on mysticism and on art. Both mysticism and art are products of the death drive, but whereas the suicide bomber and the animal directly and purely pursue death (again, on Kristeva's view) Teresa and Adel remain on its outer edge and merely play with mortality. ","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44061920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Kristeva and Race","authors":"C. Bové","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.852","url":null,"abstract":"The Kristeva Circle Conference of 2017 in Pittsburgh confirmed that writers throughout the world have been engaging with Julia Kristeva’s thought in large numbers and in ways relevant to “an ethics of inclusion,” the topic of the Conference. The question of race arguably came to a head at the conference when one of the founders of the Kristeva Circle, Fanny Söderbäck, commented on the paper just delivered by Kristeva via Skype, “The Psychic Life--A Life in Time: Psychoanalysis and Culture.” According to Söderbäck, we run the risk of reinforcing Islamophobic views that equate terrorism with Islam if we focus on young women intent on jihad without simultaneously addressing the behavior of white men bent on white supremacist violence and terrorism. Kristeva did not directly address the issue of her lecture’s reinforcement of Islamophobic views in her response. Instead, she spoke at some length about a patient whose confrontation with Arabic poetry led to improvement in her psychic health. I introduce the following papers in part as a dialogue with Kristeva on race and as a response to Söderbäck’s comments. The essays all make reference to questions of race and ethnicity in Kristeva’s work. They do so in ways that provoke thought on the contributions of psychoanalytic writing, appreciated and also criticized for its universalizing tendencies, which may in part explain its vulnerability to charges of racism.","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44935039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spain and Islam Once More: Fundamentalism in Sainte Thérèse d’Avila","authors":"C. Bové","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.859","url":null,"abstract":"Julia Kristeva's Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila confronts us with the contemporary problem of violent forms of fundamentalism, especially Islamic, as it recreates the life of Saint Theresa. The novel's psychoanalytic perspective engages our emotions and sensations, and is also therapeutic for author and reader. But most of all, it engages our thinking and deals in depth with this compelling, timely issue.","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49599014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Logic of the Egotistical Sentence: A Reading of Descartes","authors":"Vincent Descombes","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.835","url":null,"abstract":"This text is a translation of two extracts from Vincent Descombes' 2014 book Le parler de soi. The majority of the translation consists of the chapter (I.3) that Descombes dedicates to discussing Descartes extensively. In this text, Descombes analyzes “egotistical sentences,” or I-statements, beginning with the infamous example from Descartes (cogito ergo sum). From here, he develops a substantial meditation on the nature of the self and its inherent philosophical paradoxes. The “radical question” guiding Descombes is whether or not an egotistical sentence has or implies a subject in the metaphysical sense. The conclusion, ultimately supported in part by Anscombe’s work on “I-thoughts,” explains how it could be that a subject is not implied by an egotistical sentence.","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41937155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"L’énigme du cap acéphale: Autour des parentés philosophiques entre égologie et hétérologie dans la lecture derridienne du Monsieur Teste de Valéry","authors":"Pietro Lembo","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.830","url":null,"abstract":"Le but de cette contribution c'est d'analyser la lecture derridienne du Monsieur Teste de Valery afin de montrer que, par cette figure enigmatique, Derrida a voulu proposer une deconstruction double : une deconstruction de l’egologie souveraine au moyen de l’heterologie contre-souveraine et vice-versa.","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49094158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Curiosity at Work in Deconstruction","authors":"P. Zurn","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.780","url":null,"abstract":"Beginning with Jacques Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign, I identify two forms of curiosity: 1) scientific curiosity, which proceeds through objective dissection and 2) therapeutic curiosity, which proceeds through observational confinement. Through an analysis of Derrida’s treatment of both sorts of curiosity, I notice and develop a third, deconstructive form of curiosity. Through repeated turn to the work of Sarah Kofman, I characterize this third curiosity as, by turns, linguistic, animal, and critical. As linguistic, this curiosity is a penchant for wordplay and a keenness for the unsteady reservoirs of signification, resisting any clean dissection of meaning or the confinement of terms. As animal, it tracks a scent, regularly suspending its paw, as if to emphasize the meandering and precarious quality of knowledge. And as critical, it combats the illusions of pure revelation and instead draws attention to the conjuring trick, the systematic substitution of signs, undergirding it. Finally, I consider in what way Derrida’s resistance to philosophy may be read on the grounds not of a singular wonder but of multiple curiosities.","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47216444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Surprise: A Circular Dynamic of Multi-Directional Verbalization","authors":"N. Depraz","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.832","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.832","url":null,"abstract":"To understand the dynamics of the verbalization of surprise, I will start with the philosophical theoretical place that is, in my opinion, the most remarkable in terms of the descriptive phenomenology of surprise, namely, its approach by Paul Ricœur in Freedom and Nature in terms of what he calls “emotion-surprise.” This theoretical position will lead me to retrace, in a second step, the archeology of what Ricoeur calls the “circular phenomenon” or the “circular process” of surprise, which includes body language in a burst of \"shaking\" and the language of cognitive as well as aesthetic \"shock\". There is an a priori antinomy here that is based on a post-Cartesian duality of the body and the mind, but it is circularized by Ricoeur. On the basis of this dual model of surprise, I will retrace its genealogy in a number of authors (Darwin, James, Izard, and Ekman on the one hand, and Peirce, Husserl, Dennett, Davidson, on the other hand) and will analyze some first-person descriptions that come from “microphenomenological interviews” [entretiens d’explicitation].","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41377024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Rockwell F. Clancy, Towards a Political Anthropology in the Work of Gilles Deleuze: Psychoanalysis and Anglo-American Literature (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015).","authors":"Ronald L. Bogue","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.840","url":null,"abstract":"A review of Rockwell F. Clancy, Towards a Political Anthropology in the Work of Gilles Deleuze: Psychoanalysis and Anglo-American Literature (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015).","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46311088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Did Foucault do Ethics? The \"Ethical Turn,\" Neoliberalism, and the Problem of Truth","authors":"Patrick Gamez","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.818","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues against a common misunderstanding of Foucault's work. Even after the release of his lectures at the Collège de France, which ran throughout the 1970s until his death in 1984, he is still often taken to have made an \"ethical\" turn toward the end of his life. As opposed to his genealogies of power published in the 1970s, which are relentlessly suspicious of claims of individual agency, his final monographs focus on the ethical self-formation of free individuals. I suggest that this basic misinterpretation makes possible interpretations of Foucault's work as being sympathetic to neoliberal government, by linking the ethical turn to a \"liberal\" or \"neoliberal\" turn in his thought. I present a case against the ethical turn by arguing that Foucault's main focus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, is a concern for the ways in which we become obligated by truth. ","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45402388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Putting the Ghost into Language: Cartesian Echoes in Contemporary French Medical Humanism","authors":"M. McLennan","doi":"10.5195/JFFP.2018.809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/JFFP.2018.809","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a definition of medical humanism and identifies four key contemporary medical humanists in France. It then makes two claims about the historical provenance of their humanism. First, they define it in opposition to a process of iatric medicalization that they trace to certain conceptual errors made by Descartes. But second, they remain more Cartesian than they seem to realize because they accept Descartes's knotting together of humanity, ethics and language. By looking at Gori and Del Volgo, Roudinesco and Ricoeur, the author is able to show how French medical humanism repeats the Cartesian gesture of locating humanity in language - thus facing the problem of the moral standing of so-called \"marginal\" human persons and non-human animal persons. The author concludes with a call to radicalize French medical humanism in pursuit of a more inclusive medical \"personism\".","PeriodicalId":41846,"journal":{"name":"Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46936726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}