At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva

Description

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Finalist for the 2021 Prose Awards (Biography & Autobiography category) At the Risk of Thinking is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world.

Alice Jardine is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, USA. Her publications include Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan (2007), and, as translator, Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon Roudiez, 1980).

Jardine conveys the joys, pains, and struggles of this supremely creative life, animating for the reader a compassionate, brilliant woman, in her own words "an energetic pessimist." This book is a great read, most illuminating for anyone interested in this outstanding and fascinating woman and her formidable contributions. * CHOICE * Remarkable new work ... The text is significant and embodies several stand out features, which make it indispensable to Kristeva scholars and researchers ... Jardine's biography introduces the life and writings of Kristeva in substantive ways, and all researchers and graduate students dealing with the thought of Kristeva will greatly benefit from it. * Symposium * [A]n impressive example of life writing ... At the Risk of Thinking is among the best of anglophone responses to her work marked by their roots in an important wave of feminist writing on psychoanalysis. Jardine's book has the reader engage with both the controversial reception to Kristeva's life and psychoanalytic writing over the years and the ways we might receive her today. A reading of the biography is fully capable of empowering a resistance to globalization and populist governments, dangerous developments in 2020 to say the least. * Symploke * There is no doubt that this is a book for our time in that it implicitly lays bare, not a call for the renewal of community, but for a life exemplary of the way one can, as Kristeva says, 'share singularity'. * Thesis Eleven * Jardine says her book is not a hagiography, and it isn't. But she does see Kristeva as offering a model of 'how to live a thinking life' in the second half of the 20th century and after. An important part of Jardine's case is that Kristeva understands and repeatedly makes clear that 'we cannot change the world without changing the way it is imagined and spoken,' and that if her works 'do not all focus on women and maternity ... the question of the vulnerable, cognitively unusual subject is always there. * London Review of Books * An authoritative voice narrates Kristeva's life: Alice Jardine knows her subject extremely well, perhaps better than anyone writing in English. She was Kristeva's research assistant as a graduate student at Columbia in 1976 when Kristeva first went to teach there; she has conducted many interviews over a period of years and even visited Bulgaria with her. She calls her subject 'an important personal friend.' And I call this an important book ... What I admire most about At the Risk of Thinking is the author's finely nuanced, perfectly clear analyses of Kristeva's theories, concepts, and positions. -- Armine Kotin Mortimer * L'Esprit Createur * Jardine's text succeeds in several key ways. First, it offers a biographical contextualization to all of Kristeva's major works, and while other such treatments of Kristeva's life exist, none are so comprehensive. Second, Jardine's use of language is a stark contrast to that of Kristeva's in that Jardine writes in an accessible tone ... It is because of Jardine's clarity that I would recommend this text as a starting point for anyone interested in Kristeva or her ideas about semiotics, psychoanalysis, public intellectual life, feminism, and/or secular humanism. * Philosophical Inquiry in Education * I would fully recommend this work without reservation. * Nuova Biblioteca Europea * Jardine demonstrates both the gift of a novelist when she shares the key moments of Kristeva's childhood, or the mythical arrival in Paris of this young penniless Bulgarian in 1965, and of a theoretician when she introduces its key concepts, such as semiotics or reliance. (Bloomsbury Translation) * French Studies * Biographer Jardine brings Kristeva to the fore as a writer to show how she shines analytical light on even the most uncomfortable aspects of the human with unparalleled productivity and how she is not afraid to articulate the unspeakable ... Jardine has succinctly explained to what extent Kristeva lived up to this during her career as a journalist - first in theory, then in psychoanalytic practice, and finally also in political intervention. (Bloomsbury Translation) * Jungle World * Alice Jardine's intellectual biography of Julia Kristeva is breathtaking. Exploring the relationship between Kristeva's life and her writings, Jardine reflects not only on the powerful influences on Kristeva's thinking and the importance of Kristeva's work for contemporary culture, but also on what it means to write a biography. Beautifully written and full of insight, Jardine's biography is a must read for anyone interested in French Theory and Kristeva's definitive role in its development. * Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University, USA * People, cities, vibrant seminar rooms, intellectual and amorous encounters: following the thread of Kristeva's books, Alice Jardine takes us on a journey across shifting social and political landscapes in her passionate biographical account of one of the most important thinkers of our epoch. * Miglena Nikolchina, Professor of Literary Theory, University of Sofia, Bulgaria * With a light and magical touch, Alice Jardine narrates the story of Julia Kristeva's journey from the Black Sea to the Atlantic to the expanse of human singularity. In her intimate account, Jardine shows how Kristeva became one of the most extraordinary intellectuals of our era. Scholars will be delighted with new biographical nuggets, such as why it was that Lacan didn't make it to that trip to China. But more, for every reader, here is is a story that will inspire us all to think more deeply, to revolt against preconceptions, and--instead of being shaped by the Big Other--to become our own force in creating the meaning of our lives. * Noelle McAfee, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program, Emory University, USA *