Blake Smith (Advanced Academia Fellow, Oct ‘23 – Feb ‘24) will give a talk on:

Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva’s Personal Turn, 1975-1983

on 25 January (Thursday), at 16:30 h.

Moderated by Nadezhda Alexandrova.

Abstract: Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, after years of close collaboration with each other as leading figures on the French intellectual scene, broke with the idiosyncratic avant-garde form of leftism that they had belonged to for the past decade. Mao and revolution were out; the United States and a ‘second liberalism’ were in. Alongside this shift towards the center, if not the right, both Barthes and Kristeva declared that politics needed to be rethought from the position of individual subjects and their intimate experience–particularly the experience of romantic love (or its absence). My presentation will briefly situate Barthes and Kristeva’s trajectories leading up to this shift, and then explore their ideas on the political importance of love, reflecting both on their historical context and present-day philosophical interest.