A day with Julia Kristeva: arts, ethics, philosophy, politics.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Grant, Megan
• Date: 01 January 1997

A day with Julia Kristeva: arts, ethics, philosophy, politics Tuesday July 9, 1996 Artspace, Woolloomooloo

Presented by the Women's Research Centre at Macquarie University and the University of Western Sydney, Nepean, a day with Julia Kristeva promised much and really delivered. The suggestion that Kristeva herself would be present was a false/imaginary one but two of her most well-known interpreters Kelly Oliver and John Lechte gave keynote addresses.

For me, the first paper from Kelly Oliver of the University of Texas, Austin was the stand-out piece. Oliver, the author of Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double Bind Oliver delivered a paper entitled "The Mind Body Problem" which encapsulated one of the major challenges of Kristeva's writings on the "narcissistic structure" (see Fashion article). Oliver faced the difficulty that these works engender: that the polarisation of the imaginary father and the abject mother of Kristeva's theory of individuation does little to challenge patriarchal psychoanalytic paradigms. "Where is the father's body?" was the question which focussed this issue for Oliver.

She concludes that it has been "repressed." Semen is exempted from Kristeva's list of abject...