Former Fellows

My project, titled “Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva’s Personal Turn, 1975-1983,” examines a moment in the history of French thought when the certainties of Marxism and Structuralism were collapsing. In the last half-decade of the 1970s and first years of the 1980s, Barthes and Kristeva, leading intellectuals on the French Left, began to break from this political formation towards a new kind of apparently a-political thinking. Following a trip together to Mao’s China, which Barthes dismissed as a failure and Kristeva initially celebrated as a utopian experiment (before rejecting it in favor of a new appreciation for capitalist democracy, inspired by the United States, in the late 70s), each turned to writing about intimate emotional processes rather than political struggle. Barthes gave a series of lectures on ‘the lover’s discourse,’ culminating in a book on the subject; Kristeva prepared a book on ‘abjection,’ Powers of Horror, followed by her own analysis of love. And yet, I argue, their mutual turns to the personal were not only shaped by their different political reactions to Communist China, but represented a common project of rethinking the foundations of Western politics from a post-utopian vantage, founded on a careful analysis of psychic life.